51–60 of 159 posts
I honestly didn't realise the Raspberry Pi isn't open source. Why isn't it? The Foundation's charitable objective is education, so sure, it's not necessary , but there really seems to be no reason for it to be closed - I suppose it's just 'closed by default'?
Promising hardware, though this isn't looking like comparable hardware even to the Raspberry Pi Zero. Only has a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) processor at 500+ MHz. RAM size not specified. If it was priced in the $5-15 range it would be more or less practical, but higher than that I'd be buying it solely for the architecture novelty.
Why is RISC-V even so hyped up/successful? Other open ISAs precede it, and AFAIK the code density that RISC-V allows is disappointing considering the designers had an opportunity to start from scratch.
The RISC-V ISA with the Compressed extension is very competitive and often better pretty much anything else.
RISC-V also has an innovative modular structure that allows it to be optimally used in many different industries while sharing a lot of code.
The RISC-V Vector extension is really good and innovative. And so are some of the other extension.
Why is RISC-V even so hyped up/successful? Other open ISAs precede it, and AFAIK the code density that RISC-V allows is disappointing considering the designers had an opportunity to start from scratch.
One concrete advantage RISCV has is its variable-length SIMD instruction set. The assembly instructions used for SIMD in RISCV can all operate on data sizes that are various powers of 2. All using the same instructions. You could even call it “SIMD with dynamically-sized data”. Right now, x86 needs one set of instructions for each SIMD data size. That’s why we have SSE, AVX, AVX512, etc. This introduces complexity fo…
Apparently they plan to include a PowerVR GPU on the second generation boards. That's not very OSHW if you ask me. I'd rather an unaccelerated framebuffer, or even no graphics at all. They don't seem to understand what kind of market there is for this sort of device. If I didn't care about this sort of thing, I would just grab one of the many proprietary-encumbered SBCs, any of which faster and cheaper than this boar…
I honestly didn't realise the Raspberry Pi isn't open source. Why isn't it? The Foundation's charitable objective is education, so sure, it's not necessary , but there really seems to be no reason for it to be closed - I suppose it's just 'closed by default'?
I believe it's because the Broadcom System-on-a-Chip (SOC) that the Raspberry Pi uses has one or more binary BLOBS that are required to access features on the SOC. RISC-V is an open standard; chips made based on this standard are open source.
"even though the goal is to eventually have as much IP released under a BSD-like open source license" What do people mean _exactly_ by 'IP' in contexts like this related to computing boards such as SBCs and FPGAs? The only 'IP' I know is a term pertaining to legal concepts like patents, where 'IP' and 'patent' are almost synonymous. In the current context, what does it mean to 'release' this 'IP'? How do you 'release…
Promising hardware, though this isn't looking like comparable hardware even to the Raspberry Pi Zero. Only has a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) processor at 500+ MHz. RAM size not specified. If it was priced in the $5-15 range it would be more or less practical, but higher than that I'd be buying it solely for the architecture novelty.
The Pi Zero is single core at 1GHz so it's not a totally fair comparison. There are plenty of times I wish I had more cores, even if they were half the speed. Compiling anything on the zero is incredibly slow. It also has slower DDR2 RAM and no USB3 (which makes a big difference for many peripherals).
"even though the goal is to eventually have as much IP released under a BSD-like open source license" What do people mean _exactly_ by 'IP' in contexts like this related to computing boards such as SBCs and FPGAs? The only 'IP' I know is a term pertaining to legal concepts like patents, where 'IP' and 'patent' are almost synonymous. In the current context, what does it mean to 'release' this 'IP'? How do you 'release…
It's a logic or semiconductor layout design for a component (e.g. a processor core, or a peripheral like a UART, DMA controller, etc.). "IP" for hardware is roughly analogous to "source code" for software.