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Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

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Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#31
post #29

Impressive, I like this! I'm curious more in general how widely risc-v is being used in the industry today already (they mentioned a steep adoption from academia to industry). Looking at the foundation members, there are quite a big number; given they range for risc-v is from small devices to super computers, are there any examples where it's used today and showed benefits over other archs?

There'll be a few RV32 (RISC-V 32 bit) cores in every WD hard drive starting next year.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#33

This is good news for risc-v! The fact that it can be implemented so easily by hobbyists furthers the cause of trusted hardware. Sure, it won't be implementable by hobbyists at the speeds necessary for modern desktop computing, but a trusted security core (something like a yubikey) could be implemented on completely from-scratch hardware, but then still use existing trusted/vetted software (openssl), just a cross-com…

"Modern" desktop computing is perhaps less resource hungry than you think when you cut away so much graft of telemetry. None or barely few games, of course. But word processing, email, and pure HTML browsing without javascript? Maybe not HTML5's fancy features, but general rich text? I think it's very achievable.

> pure HTML browsing without javascript

I highly doubt this is achievable now. Turn on NoScript and vast majority of web sites just refuse to work not even properly, but to just load the content.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#35

Writing RTL takes one night but, how long will the verification take? How much will it take to tapeout? Who will pay for it?

Your only comments on HN seem to be to criticize RISC-V. The posters intention is not to start producing hardware, at no point does his project mention taping it out and manufacturing. Obviously it is just a fun side project to implement the RISC-V core ISA in an FGA. It was then made open-source on GitHub so anyone else interested can look at it. Chill out mate.

"Your only comments on HN seem to be to criticize RISC-V."

And in that, he's not alone: have you looked at RISC-V ISA? Compared to MC68000, it's exceptionally retarded, even more so when compared to OpenSPARC. Extremely dumb ISA.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#36
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your only comments on HN seem to be to criticize RISC-V. The posters intention is not to start producing hardware, at no point does his project mention taping it out and manufacturing. Obviously it is just a fun side project to implement the RISC-V core ISA in an FGA. It was then made open-source on GitHub so anyone else interested can look at it. Chill out mate.

"Your only comments on HN seem to be to criticize RISC-V." And in that, he's not alone: have you looked at RISC-V ISA? Compared to MC68000, it's exceptionally retarded, even more so when compared to OpenSPARC. Extremely dumb ISA.

If you named anything specific about the RISC-V ISA that you think is retarded, you might contribute something to the conversation.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#37

This is good news for risc-v! The fact that it can be implemented so easily by hobbyists furthers the cause of trusted hardware. Sure, it won't be implementable by hobbyists at the speeds necessary for modern desktop computing, but a trusted security core (something like a yubikey) could be implemented on completely from-scratch hardware, but then still use existing trusted/vetted software (openssl), just a cross-com…

"Modern" desktop computing is perhaps less resource hungry than you think when you cut away so much graft of telemetry. None or barely few games, of course. But word processing, email, and pure HTML browsing without javascript? Maybe not HTML5's fancy features, but general rich text? I think it's very achievable.

> But word processing, email, and pure HTML browsing without javascript? Maybe not HTML5's fancy features, but general rich text?

All things I've seen achieved on a 486... In fact, come to think of it, I've seen people doing all of the above on m68k-based systems too.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#38

This is good news for risc-v! The fact that it can be implemented so easily by hobbyists furthers the cause of trusted hardware. Sure, it won't be implementable by hobbyists at the speeds necessary for modern desktop computing, but a trusted security core (something like a yubikey) could be implemented on completely from-scratch hardware, but then still use existing trusted/vetted software (openssl), just a cross-com…

"Modern" desktop computing is perhaps less resource hungry than you think when you cut away so much graft of telemetry. None or barely few games, of course. But word processing, email, and pure HTML browsing without javascript? Maybe not HTML5's fancy features, but general rich text? I think it's very achievable.

My software "stack" hasn't changed in maybe 15 years now. It's emacs + firefox + terminal and a couple utilities here and there. It ran fine on my first computer with a single core ~1GHz CPU and 128MB of RAM (although multi-core architectures and more RAM did make it a lot easier to multi-task later). The only reason I upgrade my computer these days is to run modern games, for everything else except compilation I could probably use a computer from 10 years ago and not feel the difference.

I'd gladly switch to a completely open source hardware architecture even if it meant losing a significant amount of raw performance provided that the hardware and OS are stable and it's not prohibitively expensive.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#39
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your only comments on HN seem to be to criticize RISC-V." And in that, he's not alone: have you looked at RISC-V ISA? Compared to MC68000, it's exceptionally retarded, even more so when compared to OpenSPARC. Extremely dumb ISA.

If you named anything specific about the RISC-V ISA that you think is retarded, you might contribute something to the conversation.

Again: have you looked at the assembler code? Are you able to compare MC68000 assembler and RISC-V assembler? Are you able to compare SPARC assembler and RISC-V assembler?

Without being able to do that, it's going to be exceptionally difficult for me to contribute any more to the discussion, especially typing on a mobile telephone.

That's my contribution for now, I'm pointing out what to compare with. That point was obviously missed.

You have to bring something to the table too, instead of just demanding everything be spoon fed and served on a Silver platter to you.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Modern" desktop computing is perhaps less resource hungry than you think when you cut away so much graft of telemetry. None or barely few games, of course. But word processing, email, and pure HTML browsing without javascript? Maybe not HTML5's fancy features, but general rich text? I think it's very achievable.

My software "stack" hasn't changed in maybe 15 years now. It's emacs + firefox + terminal and a couple utilities here and there. It ran fine on my first computer with a single core ~1GHz CPU and 128MB of RAM (although multi-core architectures and more RAM did make it a lot easier to multi-task later). The only reason I upgrade my computer these days is to run modern games, for everything else except compilation I cou…

That sounds nice actually.

I'm currently dealing with our legacy system which means I have multiple virtualised systems running in a replica of our production system.

Currently using ~25 gig of RAM just to run the environments and an IDE.

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