> A compiler team already wrote a shader compiler to run high-end graphics jobs on its chips.
All major shader ISAs today are RISCé (no new VLIWs, that I'm aware), and this sentence seems to prove that RISC-V is a viable (base) ISA for shader cores.
> Ditzel designed server processors at the former Sun Microsystems and startup Transmeta before doing a relatively short stint at Intel.
The CEO of Esperanto Technologies worked at a company which built a product on Dynamic Binary Translation from x86. Can anyone guess what else might be cooking in that compiler team? :- )
I mused earlier today that I'd like to put a RISC-V SBC in an old ThinkPad chassis.
Maybe ET-Minion is GPU-like enough to stand in for a GPU on a workstation, and maybe ET-Maxion would make a good host CPU for that. Set the voltages and frequencies right, and you might be able to put them both in a 2011-era laptop, built to supply and dissipate 35W of load at times.
I'm not sure, I'm hoping that there will be a dev board for the SiFive U500 range; though if there is one, chances are it will not have an integrated GPU. Though, if we're talking desktop use cases, you could use the PCIe 3.0 bus to add one, if that's what you're looking for. I think we're still probably at least a year off from the first RISC-V SBC with an application processor and a GPU on it.
I looked at the announcements, and it looks like SiFive will have something called "HiFive Unleashed" coming out in Q1, sooner than I thought. It looks like a U500 board with an HDMI port (and USB ports) attached through an FPGA. So you could even get somewhat (2d) accelerated framebuffer probably with a little bit of fiddling on the FPGA, not sure what kind of resolutions you could get out of the HDMI with an FPGA-based CRTC though. :- )
All major shader ISAs today are RISCé (no new VLIWs, that I'm aware), and this sentence seems to prove that RISC-V is a viable (base) ISA for shader cores.
> Ditzel designed server processors at the former Sun Microsystems and startup Transmeta before doing a relatively short stint at Intel.
The CEO of Esperanto Technologies worked at a company which built a product on Dynamic Binary Translation from x86. Can anyone guess what else might be cooking in that compiler team? :- )
I mused earlier today that I'd like to put a RISC-V SBC in an old ThinkPad chassis.
Maybe ET-Minion is GPU-like enough to stand in for a GPU on a workstation, and maybe ET-Maxion would make a good host CPU for that. Set the voltages and frequencies right, and you might be able to put them both in a 2011-era laptop, built to supply and dissipate 35W of load at times.
Just a thought.