open source microprocessor

ErNa

I do not believe, P1 reached EOL, one reason is, that P1 could be used to teach FPGA usage and soft processors. I now became aware of this: ecnmag.com/news/2016/03/open-source-microprocessor and there may be some arguments in this article, valid for P1 too. (not power consumption ;-) )

Heater.

That is great. It's RISC V architecture.

I think the RISC V has the potential to become huge. There is a company in England working on getting a RISC, the Indian government is working on RISC V projects, a lot of companies that use ARM are looking at it as a way of getting out of the ARM licensing problem.

Code for this project, the PULPino, is here: https://github.com/pulp-platform/pulpino

kwinn

Great news. Every successful open source project like this is an addition to the shared computing and communication infrastructure our society is built on.

KeithE

There were multiple press releases from some of the RISC V guys today:

https://www.sifive.com

I don't understand how they plan to make enough money to satisfy the VCs. Their current CEO is a managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures. I don't think that design services or FPGA boards is the main plan. Maybe they plan to develop some IP to do along with the RISC V that has to be licensed from them?

Any ideas? I must be missing something basic.

jmg

KeithE wrote: »

... I don't think that design services or FPGA boards is the main plan. Maybe they plan to develop some IP to do along with the RISC V that has to be licensed from them?

Any ideas? I must be missing something basic.

I see this in the Docs

"E300 FPGA Development BoardE300 FPGA boards with preconfigured designs areavailable to support development of software and hard-ware for the E300 platform. "

- looks like they focus on FPGA boards, and probably consulting to get it into 180nm, (in E300 case)
so seems rather like the design house step Parallax are using now for P2.