
Momentum builds for open-source processors (2001) - ashitlerferad
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1179860
======
lkcl
the cost of doing say a 180nm chip is somewhere around... USD $10,000. that's
$10,000 _per shot_... and you end up with something around... maybe... 200mhz
maximum? and consuming vast amounts of power, relative to today's technology?

here's the really interesting thing: i've been in touch with the head of the
shakti team, madhu, and he tells me that the Indian Govt has basically given
him CARTE BLANCH to design processors for primarily the indian market but also
world-wide distribution.

the "catch"? due to Intel getting into bed with the NSA, the entire chip and
its associated source code MUST be entirely libre, right down to the bedrock.

funnily enough, i don't have a problem with that... do you? :)

so in discussions with him last week (he is very busy on a tape-out deadline
at the moment), he said that he would be happy to offer the open hardware
community _free_ access to the university's 180nm fab, to be able to do proof-
of-concept testing, and that he also wants to make available his team and
expertise to create an entirely libre RISC-V multi-core SoC. i have done a
preliminary design here: [http://rhombus-
tech.net/riscv/shakti/m_class/](http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/shakti/m_class/)

various foundries have offered free MVP samples, and various other companies
have offered free access to tools that normally cost USD $80m to license. this
on the basis that the Indian local market is so... INSANELY LARGE that they
recognise that they will make literally billions of dollars over the next few
years.

so it's getting very interesting.

~~~
Shoothe
Wow, that's really interesting. Is there a web page where one could watch the
progress or read the news about this?

------
monocasa
Does anyone here know why OpenCores atrophied so much between now and then? It
had so much going for it.

~~~
Taniwha
I think that it's really hard for stuff like this to take off, to fab a real
CPU can cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars of NRE, to fab a piece of
open source software the NRE is essentially $0 - there just aren't enough
(maybe no) people with the interest and time to spend on a large open source
project AND hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw at it

~~~
dbcurtis
Fab isn't the real issue. ARM Holdings doesn't have a fab. They license IP in
HDL form to people that have fabs. And those people with fabs would like not
to pay license fees. So why do they pay? Ecosystem.

So let's say your team has what it takes to design and validate the HDL for a
processor microarchitecture that implements some un-encoumered ISA with
performance that is attractive and a sufficiently short errata list. Then
published the HDL under some free-as-in-speech license. You still have to get
gcc, llvm, and gdb to support you, at a minimum. And then you want the
hardware debugger people to support you. They will support you if you get
enough users, if you get enough support from tool makers you will get users.
The trick is not running out of money before the ecosystem spins up and your
competition releases a more attractive core.

~~~
Taniwha
ARM did fab their original design(s) ... (on someone else's fab)

(having done this ....) getting gcc/gdb/linux/etc working for your new
architecture is something you will have done long before release your gates -
both on your architectural simulator and you've probably booted linux at least
once to a prompt on your gates (or at least HDL)

I've been on both sides, I found bugs in the original 29k bringing up unix
(pre-linux) on the architectural simulator that were in the real chip, and as
a logic designer helped design a new CPU and bring up linux on it

Anyone who seriously has a new CPU already has that ecosystem in place at the
point they announce their CPU (and is probably busy trying to push their
changes upstream to the gcc/llvm/glibc/uboot/linux/etc trees the day they
announce to prove they are real)

But I agree the trick is to not run out of money ....

~~~
lkcl
would you be interested - and self-motivated - to help get an entirely libre
RISC-V SoC up and running, that has the building blocks of a VPU and also
enough Vector Processing in some form to do decent 3D graphics as well? tools
are paid for. access to foundries is available (20nm, 28nm, 40nm). engineering
resources via the shakti project are also available. [http://rhombus-
tech.net/riscv/shakti/m_class/](http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/shakti/m_class/)
if so do get in touch, luke.leighton@gmail.com

