Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night by simias on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @06:47AM (#17867200)

My software "stack" hasn't changed in maybe 15 years now. It's emacs + firefox + terminal and a couple utilities here and there. It ran fine on my first computer with a single core ~1GHz CPU and 128MB of RAM (although multi-core architectures and more RAM did make it a lot easier to multi-task later). The only reason I upgrade my computer these days is to run modern games, for everything else except compilation I could probably use a computer from 10 years ago and not feel the difference.

I'd gladly switch to a completely open source hardware architecture even if it meant losing a significant amount of raw performance provided that the hardware and OS are stable and it's not prohibitively expensive.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night by kilburn on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @07:43AM (#17867440)

I don't know what "prohibitvely expensive" is in your case, but there's a possibility today:

Grab one HiFive Unleashed for $999 [1]:

- 4 cores up to 1.5Ghz

- 8Gb DDR4 ECC Ram

- 1Gbps ethernet

Then grab one HiFive Unleashed Expansion Board for $1,999 [2]:

- SSD M.2 Connector

- SATA3 Connector

- x16 PCIE Connector (4 lanes of pcie2)

- A bunch of other cool stuff you wouldn't probably use (SPI, FPGA, etc.)

Finally grab some M.2 Drive and a graphics card ($500 maybe?).

This would set you back a grand total of $3500, which is definitely way more expensive than the current mainstream but may fit within "non-prohibitively expensive" for some. The whole platform should be open source [3].

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed [2] https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expan... [3] https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night by dtx1 on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @09:44AM (#17868146)

While the hifive is an awesome proof of concept 3,5 k$ for essentially something performing roughly as well as a raspberry pi seems prohibitively expensive for now.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night by acct1771 on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @11:30AM (#17868975)

Seems worth it.

My issue would be paying all that, and then strapping closed source hardware to it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night by noir_lord on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @07:29AM (#17867379)

That sounds nice actually.

I'm currently dealing with our legacy system which means I have multiple virtualised systems running in a replica of our production system.

Currently using ~25 gig of RAM just to run the environments and an IDE.

[ Parent | on HN ]