Earlier quoted context omitted.
Desktops, perhaps never - 10 years? Alibaba seem to be funding some R&D in this direction, but I'm not too familiar (and I can't speak Chinese). It's certainly possible, but desktop processors aren't simple in any way. Regardless of absolute technical excellence, RISC-V only has to be better than ARM (in both specification and implementation, and cost, of course) which will be a moving target as RISC-V improves. Sing…
> ... https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unleashed this seems to fit the bill. However, they don't seem to be selling those yet ... The HiFive Unleashed was released (and for sale) back in 2018. From memory, there was a limited run (priced at US$1k each), as it was targeted to specific types of developers looking to do further work improving the platform. For example, Red Hat bought some and used them for improving…
ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#52Is it any better than Artix-7 XC7A100T or XC7A35T boards from Aliexpress(search QMTECH, they sell 100K board for ~$100)?
Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you say more about why this one is the one? Is it better in quantitative ways or ease of use than competitors? Cheaper or more reliable? Etc
Stratix 10 is an absolutely enormous FPGA (10FLOPS) so I'm guessing wow-factor rather than ease of use.
Oh wow, I had no idea they were that advanced. How much do these go for secondhand?
Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#54How does it compare to the Arty A7 for $129?
There is this mystical unit LUT, every manufacturer defines it a bit differently, but it’s ok to use it for comparison. Arty A7 has 35k of them, the cheapest board has 12k. Arty A7 is clear winner here. I think, Digilent has another cheaper Artix 7 board with 35k LUTs.
Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#55Can anyone comment on how this compares to the popular Terasic DE10-Nano used for the MiSTer project? The price point is around the same and I see they note running video game cores as a market for this device, but I have absolutely no clue how to reasonably compare FPGAs. From my rudimentary understanding it looks like this doesn't have a hard CPU and has a smaller FPGA, so I'm guessing we have a fair bit of "open h…
“Open hardware tax” is huge here, your impression is correct. Real 800MHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor is on Terasic board while this has a soft core processor. In my experience soft core can run at ~200 MHz best case. Then comes slower RAM and this limits overall possible applications. Unless somebody wants RISC-V badly.
Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#56Cool! It also does Oberon, MicroPython and Basic.
Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unleashed this seems to fit the bill. However, they don't seem to be selling those yet ... The HiFive Unleashed was released (and for sale) back in 2018. From memory, there was a limited run (priced at US$1k each), as it was targeted to specific types of developers looking to do further work improving the platform. For example, Red Hat bought some and used them for improving…
https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed
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Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#58Cool! It also does Oberon, MicroPython and Basic.
And DOS, NES, Amiga, Apple I, Apple II, Z80 !
I am new to FPGAs so it is a bit difficult to know what to expect from a given number of LUTs, but you can compare between models: the big version of ECP5 in ULX3S has 85k LUTs while the previous well open-source supported FPGA (iCE40) had only up to 7.7 k LUTs, so more than a 10x jump :)
Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#59Also newsworthy: Lattice drops recent EULA clause forbidding fpga bitstream reverse engineering https://hackaday.com/2020/06/06/lattice-drops-eula-clause-fo... therefore 2020 could be a milestone for open FPGA toolchains!
I posted it here a few days ago, as I found the news quite interesting !
Re: ULX3S: Hackable FPGA that runs Linux on RISC-V
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stratix 10 is an absolutely enormous FPGA (10FLOPS) so I'm guessing wow-factor rather than ease of use.
Oh wow, I had no idea they were that advanced. How much do these go for secondhand?
There is no sensible secondhand market for things like this; it will be embedded in someone's board. And there aren't many about to start with.
Sometimes people are lucky enough to find decent FPGAs in scrap, but it's like panning for gold.