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A comment on Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor. Parent comment

Re:Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor by sklogic on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @04:40PM (#11392817)
You did not get it. MyHDL is simply a macro-processor used to generate an RTL. And generating a sequence of similar, say, module instances is ok even with an imperative language, even Verilog got for loops for this.

Chisel and Clash are not any different.

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Re:Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor by vvanders on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @04:50PM (#11392892)
You might want to re-read my post again, I'm specifically railing against imperative -> RTL/VHDL/Verilog.

Verilog may have for loops but they're largely used for simulation, they're expensive in terms of synthesized hardware(mostly toolchain/process dependent on how they synthesize) and can only be fixed size.

I've got no issue with Chisel, it's a DSL which I think is a good fit. What I'm arguing against is constructs that don't have a clear mapping to hardware representations which means you have to guess at what the compiler generates(see my Mealy vs Moore comment above).

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Re:Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor by kersny on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @04:57PM (#11392945)
My understanding is that MyHDL is in fact more like Chisel/Clash, it specifically says "It does not turn arbitrary Python into silicon" in their getting started guide (and as sklogic says).

See also: a MyHDL UART: https://github.com/andrecp/myhdl_simple_uart/blob/master/ser...

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Re:Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor by vvanders on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @05:09PM (#11393026)
Yeah, but that feels like round hole/square peg -ish. It's like saying we've got all this stuff over here but don't use it, really, we mean don't!

You're going to spend a ton of docs explaining to the user what parts of the language you can't use rather than having a DSL spec that's clear in what's supported.

With a proper DSL you also don't have to massage language features that don't quite map(say enums for state machines) into a format that it's not meant for.

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Re:Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor by sebastic on Thursday March 31, 2016 @02:01AM (#11395276)
You have no idea what you're talking about. You're wrong, MyHDL is a proper hardware DSL in Python. You've never used it and you have no idea what you're talking about
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Re:Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor by sklogic on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @05:01PM (#11392963)
MyHDL is exactly the same kind of a eDSL as Chisel. And you have a full control of what it generates, see the examples.
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Re:Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor by vvanders on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @05:09PM (#11393029)
If it's Python, it's not a DSL by definition.

Since you don't seem interested in addressing just one issue(I'm sure I could come up with more) around state machines I don't see any reason in continuing this discussion.

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Re:Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor by sklogic on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @05:22PM (#11393118)
> If it's Python, it's not a DSL by definition.

Scala is not any better. It's exactly the same kind of a eDSL - no macros, nothing, just generating objects in runtime and then serialising this tree into a Verilog code. Nothing fancy.

> around state machines

What state machines?!? It does not have any more features for defining FSMs than an underlying Verilog.

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