
Microwatt: A Tiny Open Power ISA Softcore Written in VHDL 2008 - protomyth
https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
======
Gys
From Wikipedia, for people like me:

The Power ISA is an instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by the
OpenPOWER Foundation, led by IBM. It was originally developed by the now
defunct Power.org industry group. Power ISA is an evolution of the PowerPC
ISA, created by the mergers of the core PowerPC ISA and the optional Book E
for embedded applications.

VHDL (VHSIC-HDL) (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description
Language) is a hardware description language used in electronic design
automation to describe digital and mixed-signal systems such as field-
programmable gate arrays and integrated circuits.

------
brandmeyer
For a software engineer's view of the POWER ISA, I found Raymond Chen's blog
series informative.

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99425)

------
Traster
Power is a great ISA for simple FPGA development because its instruction set
is generally fixed width and well organised. So you can fit it to a nice look
up table, the case statements are a thing of beauty. Whereas x86 style
instructions are variable length and more difficult to work with.

I hope to see a lot more like this with the open sourcing. I'm not sure it's
very competitive, but it's a great education tool at the very least.

