[HN Gopher] The Heart of RISC-V Development Is Unmatched
___________________________________________________________________
The Heart of RISC-V Development Is Unmatched
Author : guerby
Score : 154 points
Date : 2020-10-29 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sifive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sifive.com)
| winter_blue wrote:
| $665 is a bit too much for the specs they've offered. They should
| try to be price competitive instead of charging a premium. You
| can likely get a more powerful x86 system for less.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| This is a dev board, not an end user product. As such it is
| reasonably priced.
| snvzz wrote:
| I would hope for these to be sold at cost, and doubt they
| cost that much. Profits shouldn't come from scalping risc-v
| developers.
|
| I am hopeful some Chinese company will release something that
| will force some humility into the risc-v market. At least one
| candidate has been seen in the thread[0].
|
| [0]: http://www.semimedia.cc/?p=7803
| mlyle wrote:
| Not having reached enough developers and leading adopters
| means no market available except developers doing
| fundamental porting and experimentation.
|
| Targeted at developers doing fundamental porting means no
| volume.
|
| No volume means high prices. Low volume ASIC runs aren't
| cheap. Amortizing NRE costs of a complicated motherboard
| over dozens or hundreds of units ain't cheap either.
|
| It will sort itself out eventually, but the whole ecosystem
| has a big mountain to climb to get to where ARM is.
| TomVDB wrote:
| "Scalping"?
|
| What are you talking about?
| justaguy88 wrote:
| Economies of scale.
| postit wrote:
| I'll love to see the next decade battle between arm and risc-v
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Don't you mean NVIDIA vs RISC-V? ;)
| phkahler wrote:
| What would be a decent graphics card for this? I'm thinking
| something half height with no fan. Put that in a small enclosure.
| Could be a great dev/demo box.
| rwmj wrote:
| AMD Radeon up to RX580 is known to be supported.
| diarmuidc wrote:
| I've a PolarFire SOC eval board on my desk at the moment. 4x U54
| cores. Only started to play with it but lots of kernel panics so
| far. Not sure where the issue is just yet but hopefully it'll get
| more stable over the next year
| snvzz wrote:
| If only if they had support on the open FPGA stack
| (yosys+nextpnr), it'd get one in an eyeblink.
|
| Alas, I'll have to settle for softcores on ECP5.
| aseipp wrote:
| The Polarfire SOC is a very neat, powerful series of chips -- I
| also have an Icicle board and have some plans for it -- but the
| Unleashed is definitely a better purchase unless you have plans
| on utilizing the FPGA, just from the spec sheets. The Polarfire
| chip is pretty darn cool on its own though...
| diarmuidc wrote:
| FPGA is definitely my number one requirement, that's why I
| have it
| aseipp wrote:
| Yeah same here. I admit I'm real jealous of the M.2
| drive...
| azhenley wrote:
| A colleague of mine has been testing out all of the RISC-V chips
| he can get his hands on, including a few SiFive boards. He really
| likes them.
|
| Check out his free book if you are interested in understanding
| SiFive's boards or RISC-V in general: Making a RISC-V Operating
| System using Rust (https://osblog.stephenmarz.com/)
| rwmj wrote:
| _[Copying from the other item on this where I was answering a
| comment about why this is more expensive than a Raspberry Pi]_
|
| You have to understand why the Raspberry Pi is priced the way it
| is: it's because it is a side effect of the massive production of
| Broadcom chips for tablets, phones, embedded, etc. Millions and
| millions are made. A relatively tiny number of these find their
| way into developer boards. The economies of scale mean they can
| be very cheap.
|
| RISC-V doesn't have this ... yet ... but there are several
| Chinese manufacturers currently making millions of chips for
| consumer devices with those going through foundries right now. So
| sooner or later the economics will work out for a "RISC-V Pi".
| I'd be surprised if it doesn't exist by 2022.
|
| For now this SiFive board is IMHO the best PC-like developer
| experience for RISC-V. [Disclaimer: Red Hat works with SiFive]
| m463 wrote:
| _The SiFive HiFive Unmatched comes in the mini-ITX standard
| form factor to make it easy to build a RISC-V PC. For the first
| time, standard industry connectors such as ATX power supplies,
| PCI-Express(r) expansion, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB ports are
| present on a single-board RISC-V development system._
|
| Cost aside, I think using the PC ecosystem has a lot of
| advantages over the pi ecosystem.
| bipson wrote:
| I know, this discussion is quite old (e.g. Mac vs. PC), but
| can you clarify how you define PC in your post?
|
| Particularly what makes this RISC-V board a PC, what an RPi
| does not have? Form factor, ATX power or PCI-Express?
| m463 wrote:
| Use a standard power supply, put it in a case and maybe
| develop on it. and pci-express opens up possibilities the
| pi (not compute) doesn't really have access to.
|
| I have many pis that I love, but you have to admit, there
| are a few compromises made for a lower bom cost. That is
| not a requirement for a $600+ board.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Pi uses a standard power supply.
|
| You can put a Pi in a case. In fact, it's hard to find
| one on Amazon without a case.
|
| Of course you can develop on it. That's the whole point.
|
| Pi 4 has pci-express, no?
| giantrobot wrote:
| The main thing I think would be simply enumerable buses and
| support for the APCI root bus instead of the more embedded
| focused device tree.
| monocasa wrote:
| Device tree doesn't really have an embedded focus per se.
| It comes from Sparc and PowerPC workstations.
|
| And ACPI doesn't really have a standard root bus, it's a
| soup of descriptor tables and virtual machine blobs you
| have to run and trust, along with veritable mountains of
| patches for those vm bytecodes to fix firmware issues.
|
| IMO Device Tree is the right way to go for nearly all
| platforms.
| justaguy88 wrote:
| This isn't a Mac vs PC comparison, its embedded form factor
| and vs standard form factor with standard connectors
| bipson wrote:
| I didn't say it was.
|
| I was just wondering how you define PC. Form factor or
| "standard connectors" (whatever that is - which RPi
| connector is not "standard"?) are none of my criteria.
| Narishma wrote:
| > You have to understand why the Raspberry Pi is priced the way
| it is: it's because it is a side effect of the massive
| production of Broadcom chips for tablets, phones, embedded,
| etc. Millions and millions are made. A relatively tiny number
| of these find their way into developer boards. The economies of
| scale mean they can be very cheap.
|
| That was the case for the very first version, but didn't the
| subsequent models use SoCs made specifically for them?
| Accujack wrote:
| Answer here on Reddit:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/egwo6z/was_th.
| ..
| CameronNemo wrote:
| They can still use designs, knowledge, and supply chains that
| have already been built and scaled.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Even the first one was an SoC which didn't sell well so they
| got it almost for free.
| bipson wrote:
| Further, a RPi is not a development board.
|
| Development boards are typically more expensive, since they are
| produced in lower numbers, and have features a consumer is not
| interested in (debugging, etc.).
|
| Unless the manufacturer pushes development boards hard to e.g.
| pull developers in to the new eco-system quickly, then they
| might get sold at a bargain. But those are then usually not
| usable in place of the "real thing" (would cut into sales).
| rwmj wrote:
| To be fair the RPi 4 8 GB with a UAS disk _is_ getting pretty
| good: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-
| pi-4-running... I use it for Arm development.
| bipson wrote:
| Oh, well I guess you can _use_ it as a development board -
| granted. Never occurred to me.
|
| Although I would expect better debugging interfaces, less
| hacky hardware setup, a reasonable boot-loader, etc. Some
| things improved over the generations, true.
| rwmj wrote:
| It's a lot cheaper than getting everyone Cavium
| ThunderX2's :-)
| samatman wrote:
| I know this a losing battle, but I can't help but pipe up from
| time to time: that's a disclosure, not a disclaimer.
|
| I'm grateful to everyone putting in the work to make RISC-V
| happen, open hardware is the only way out of the increasingly
| grim world of 'secure boots' and the like, which seems hell-
| bent on making general purpose computing on a trusted platform
| a thing of the past.
| silasdavis wrote:
| Gets on my tits also. It's a disclosure.
| pkaye wrote:
| Isn't RISC-V just an open standard ISA. The hardware
| implementation might be closed source. Its still possible to
| but secure boot features on to an implementation.
| samatman wrote:
| Sure. It makes the world I'd like to live in possible, it
| doesn't guarantee we'll get it.
|
| But foundries will burn whatever chip you have the money to
| pay for. Having a robust open standard ISA lowers the
| barriers enough that I'm confident we'll see free-as-in-
| freedom CPUs and GPUs come out of the project.
| rasz wrote:
| >it's because it is a side effect of the massive production of
| Broadcom chips for tablets, phones, embedded
|
| There was exactly one product using same BCM2835 chip found in
| first Pee, Roku2. VideoCore 4 architecture (but different
| silicon) was also used in few Samsung phones, and Nokia 808 as
| GPU only (no CPU cores).
|
| Broadcom had zero VideoCore design wins past ~2014.
|
| >A relatively tiny number of these find their way into
| developer boards
|
| VideoCore is pretty much strictly rasPee boards now.
| mlyle wrote:
| I guess you don't like the Pi, and that's fine. But most of
| us stopped using silly derogatory language like that many
| years ago.
|
| If you've got a complaint, say it like a grownup, IMO.
| jwr wrote:
| As an embedded developer and system designer with many
| years of experience with Broadcom SOCs, I largely share
| @centimeter's sentiment, and would likely use similar
| wording in a private conversation.
| ArcticCelt wrote:
| >So sooner or later the economics will work out for a "RISC-V
| Pi".
|
| There is already pretty cool stuff. Look at this developer
| board, you get a RISC-V Dual Core 64bit + an ESP32 (a full MCU
| for wifi + Bluetooth) on the same board and a camera for $24.
| That Risc-V chip is optimized for processing neural networks.
|
| https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-Maixduino-Kit-for-RISC-V-...
|
| (warning site very slow)
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > So sooner or later the economics will work out for a "RISC-V
| Pi"
|
| This is cooler than Raspberry Pi because it has PCIe x8 (which
| I couldn't find on the picture but the specs say its there) and
| M.2 slots.
| centimeter wrote:
| The broadcom SoC used on the raspi is also a horrendously
| designed unstable piece of shit. I can't wait for open source
| SoCs to come eat its lunch.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| The smallest development board for Huawei's HarmonyOS uses a
| RISC-V chip:
|
| https://device.harmonyos.com/en/docs/start/introduce/oem_wif...
| _alex_ wrote:
| I didn't know riscv was making its way into consumer goods yet.
| Any examples you can share of places seeing riscv adoption?
| justincormack wrote:
| There are Risc-V chips in the Google Pixel phones in the
| image processing core, see notes here
| https://techroose.com/tech/riscvWorkshop.html
|
| There are probably lots more, but lots are not documented.
| TomVDB wrote:
| They are in a lot of current Western Digital SSDs. Nvidia is
| known to have them in their GPUs in some form. I know of
| other consumer products where they are similarly used as
| embedded CPU, which is where RISC-V will be most prevalent in
| the coming years.
| wtallis wrote:
| Western Digital is heavily involved in RISC-V, but I wasn't
| aware that they had confirmed any of their products are
| using RISC-V yet. Last I heard from them, their first
| generation of in-house NVMe SSD controllers were
| definitively _not_ using RISC-V. And their second
| generation of NVMe SSD controllers is only just starting to
| ship.
| rwmj wrote:
| Even better, WD have open sourced their implementation (as
| SweRV core: https://github.com/chipsalliance/Cores-SweRV)
| rwmj wrote:
| AllWinner are one company that has publicly disclosed doing a
| large multi-million run of chips:
| http://www.semimedia.cc/?p=7803 It's not exactly clear from
| that announcement what they are going to use them for though.
| "industrial control, smart home, and consumer electronics" -
| that's _everything_ :-)
| snvzz wrote:
| This is great news. If peripherals are the same or similar
| to those in their existing ARM SoC chips, we'd be close to
| full support on release thanks to the linux-sunxi project
| efforts[0] and similar efforts in netbsd.
|
| [0]: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
| noja wrote:
| Is there a RISC-V PC I can buy now that will run Fedora?
| rwmj wrote:
| No. You can run Fedora out of the box on QEMU[1]. We have
| Fedora running on the Unleashed, but you can't buy those
| boards any more. SiFive have Fedora running on the Unmatched,
| which you can preorder now and will ship this quarter.
|
| [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V/Insta
| lli...
| scroot wrote:
| The RISC-V spec is clear and simple enough to work with even for
| a dolt like me. I have started a project to implement the
| instruction set in Smalltalk [1] (shameless plug), along with
| basic CPU simulation. Hopefully I'll be able to develop low level
| risc systems in this environment with decent debugging.
|
| [1] https://github.com/darth-cheney/safe-bet
| wtroughton wrote:
| > For debugging and monitoring, developers can access the console
| output of the board through the built-in microUSB type-B
| connector.
|
| As a software developer who's interested in this but has no
| experience with low-level hardware interface, how does one debug
| with the microUSB connector? What displays the console output?
| luismarques wrote:
| It's just exposes a UART (serial port) to USB device. With the
| right driver you'll get a serial port (ttyUSB, COM port, etc.)
| in your OS/
| [deleted]
| ezconnect wrote:
| The USB acts as a serial interface that spits out a lot of text
| for you to consume. They probably have a dedicated core for
| debugging on the silicon.
| timidger wrote:
| As a software developer that, at one point in a job, was forced
| to confront hardware head on because the code I was writing was
| firmware, I'm guessing they mean something like Kermit. A
| simple tool to get the output from an embedded device.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| What distros can I install on such a device? Are there Firefox,
| LibreOffice, VLC, ScummVM and Python 3 ports available?
| gspr wrote:
| Judging from Debian:
|
| - Firefox: not quite, but the hurdle is minor, see below. Will
| be fixed when there's a demand.
|
| - LibreOffice: no.
|
| - VLC: yes.
|
| - ScummVM: builds, but fails 1 of 279 tests. Hopefully soon?
|
| - Python 3: Yes.
|
| I'll find the relevant Firefox email thread for you.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Cool, thank you. You can probably see what I mean: if
| everything from this list works fine it makes a desktop
| computer sufficient for me and many other people. I imply
| most of the classic text-mode tools already work or can be
| ported with little difficulty. I've forgotten to mention
| Visual Studio Code but I understand it's going to be slightly
| harder, it hasn't been long since we've gotten an ARM port.
| snvzz wrote:
| $666 is an improvement over $1k.
|
| It's still a core without V or B extensions, and still
| prohibitively expensive for anyone that doesn't need them.
|
| Useful for those working on risc-v ports, and that's about it.
| ddevault wrote:
| The price really isn't that outrageous. Consider the use-case:
| this is a mini-ITX form-factor with a standard power supply,
| M.2 slots, a PCIe adapter, etc. This is designed for desktop
| workstations.
|
| It comes with the CPU, motherboard, and RAM, all in one
| package.
|
| When you sum up the costs of those in your typical desktop PC
| workstation build, it's not really that far off.
| wmf wrote:
| It's very far off since this is slower and has fewer features
| than the worst motherboard ($60) and the worst CPU ($50) on
| the market. Add $30 worth of RAM and you're up to $140.
| ddevault wrote:
| It's also the first usable workstation for a novel open-
| source architecture. It's not as fast but that's a feature
| which, in my opinion, makes the price parity reasonable.
| Progress is gradual.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It's tragic that all these chips are coming out with no
| POPCOUNT instruction, held hostage by the unfinished B
| extension.
|
| We really need to get POPCOUNT into the base (at least) 64-bit
| core set.
| MrMorden wrote:
| I appear to not be the only person who (thinks they) spotted an
| Apple I callout.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Neither V nor B are ratified, nor are they part of the Unix
| platform standard (and hopefully never will be).
|
| V is close, B is not. There are exactly 0 chips or even IP on
| the market with standard B (which is really a family of sub-
| standards), but there are chips with pre-standard V (alas, a
| few of them aren't compatible with the current draft - the
| perils of running ahead).
|
| Overall, yes you are right, this is most useful for people
| interested in seriously evaluating RV64GC and/or porting code.
| It's a one of the necessary steps on the path to more adoption,
| but not the last one.
| giomasce wrote:
| Wow! Things are really making progress in RISCV land!
| rektide wrote:
| Forewarning, comparing across utterly different segments of
| devices is bad & dangerous for the health of industries. And yet,
| let's dive in to just that: there's a lot more I/O than an RPi4
| here! 8+4+1 PCIe 3.0 slots. Wow. If it can really use the
| bandwidth these slots expose that's very impressive. 4 USB ports
| but so few folks clarify whether that's for real or shared
| bandwidth under a single usb host or whether they're independent.
| So either an effective +1.25 or +5 extra PCIe3 slots of bandwidth
| there, again, if this device can saturate those links.
|
| I'm wondering very much how the CPU fares. This is progress
| either way, but will it match a RPi4? The RPI4 has tiny I/O but I
| feel like it's probable the cpu performance is not radically
| unlike.
| elFarto wrote:
| The CPU only has 8 lanes of PCIe. It's using a PCIe switch to
| get the rest of the lanes. USB is also connected via the PCIe
| switch. The ethernet adapter is connected directly to the CPU
| though.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Again RPi comparison isn't really what you'd do here. You have
| the freedom to put whatever GPU you want in there, it has NVME
| storage, etc.
|
| It would be interesting to benchmark this against a lower
| clocked x86 system. But it's kind of an odd comparison as this
| has 5 cores instead of the 2 cores typical in a low-end PC.
| officeplant wrote:
| It might become a comparison with the Pi4 compute module +
| the current breakout board they are offering which has a PCIE
| 1x slot. So far some NVME drives are confirmed to work. Keep
| an eye on Jeff's channel[0] as he's even poked around at
| getting a GPU working as well. But he's having some issues
| atm (personally I believe he needs a breakout board with more
| power output).
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc_Lh_a1BQI
| rwmj wrote:
| I think Yunsup mentioned a small % performance improvement over
| the SiFive Unleashed. _[EDIT I wrongly said the memory had
| doubled here - see correction in follow up comment]_ On the
| other hand the SiFive Unleashed was perfectly usable for
| general development use, even for use as a desktop.
| rjsw wrote:
| I thought the Unleashed had 8GB as well.
| rwmj wrote:
| Logs in ... $ free -m
| total used free shared buff/cache
| available Mem: 7945 263 7151
| 0 531 7593 Swap: 0
| 0 0
|
| You are right!
| snvzz wrote:
| Does anybody else find very unnerving that the CPU clocks are
| undisclosed?
|
| They can't be found anywhere. Not even the product brief[0].
|
| [0]:
| https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/c05b8ddd-e043-45a6-8a29...
| rwmj wrote:
| It's 1 GHz [WRONG - see below], it was mentioned in the
| presentation. The Unleashed can be overclocked just by catting
| an entry in sysfs, I'm not sure if the same will apply here.
|
| EDIT: The clock speed I quoted above is WRONG. I'm on the
| breakout call now and they are NOT announcing clock speed at
| this time.
| snvzz wrote:
| That's good to know. At least that does ensure it's an ASIC,
| not an FPGA.
|
| Besides lack of V extension, I'm sad about the seemingly
| artificial limits (8GB RAM onboard instead of slots, so you
| can't easily make a workstation out of this) and the still
| outrageous price.
|
| I think that it has its market niche (developers working on
| risc-v ports), but most of us are better off trying RISC-V
| cores on an FPGA or emulator.
|
| I'm hoping China will solve the cheap RISC-V SoC situation by
| releasing some cheap chip SBCs can be built on, at some point
| soon.
|
| Lowrisc used to be all about doing that in an open hardware
| manner, but it seems the moment they got some funding, they
| got distracted into experiments (e.g. pointer validation
| stuff) that have little to do with achieving the original
| goal.
| rwmj wrote:
| I can assure you it's certainly an ASIC, and so was the
| Unleashed. Their very early development version from ~2017
| was an FPGA costing about $3-4K.
|
| Qemu's RISC-V emulation is excellent and if you have a fast
| CPU it's a reasonable enough development environment.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| QEMU is shockingly excellent. Do not extrapolate, but one
| piece of code I was working on ran at a 1/4 of the speed
| in RISC-V under QEMU compared to the host. That's a
| really amazing result.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Much of that is due to RISC-V being quite emulation-
| friendly as far as ISA's go. You wouldn't guess that
| given e.g. the weird encoding of insn operands, but that
| turns out to be a minor factor in practice.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Absolutely. QEMU is JITting so decode is only done once.
| What helps here is the absence of crazy semantics, like
| flag updates. Some things are still expensive, such as
| indirect branches (jalr), virtual memory translation
| (load/store), and handling RISC-V's 31 registers without
| hitting memory for each of them (the host ISA, x64, has
| only 16 architectural registers).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Note that RISC-V instruction set extensions can always be
| emulated in machine mode, so the lack of V or B extensions
| will only ever be an issue wrt. performance, not
| compatibility.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The only reason to use V or B instructions would be for
| their performance. Trapping and emulating them would be a
| cruel joke.
| justinclift wrote:
| With 4x 1GHz cores, 8GB of ram, gigabit ethernet, and PCIe...
| this thing could potentially run as a reasonable low end NAS.
| :)
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _4x 1GHz... low end NAS_
|
| I still can't get used to this. Just thinking of how much
| has been accomplished on 4.77 MHz.
| amelius wrote:
| Displays had fewer pixels in that era. Files were much
| smaller (the video and mp3 files we have now would have
| been considered insanely large back then).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| No kidding. If I weren't too burnt out at the end of the
| day, I'd really like to explore the true limits of modern
| computers. Especially since I stopped playing video
| games, and I no longer do any real number crunching, I
| feel like every computer I use (for work or home) is
| greatly underperforming relative to its potential.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, I'd also like to see ops/s, flops/s, ops and flops per
| Joule, and memory bandwidth, among others.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| No HDMI, no wifi, $665.
|
| It's a nice product but the RISC-V Pi I was hoping for still
| isn't here.
| lsllc wrote:
| Gotta start somewhere and this is much more reasonable than the
| FPGA version @ $1K!
| rwmj wrote:
| FPGA version was actually $3-4K. The previous $1K board was
| an ASIC produced in very small numbers.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It has PCIe slots for graphics, so of course no HDMI. This
| isn't a SoC-on-SBC type product like the RPi. The competitor
| here is a PC motherboard + CPU combination, not an RPi.
|
| Yes, it will be far slower than a new PC, but this is still
| pretty damn cool.
|
| To price compare you need to look at a 4+ core processor +
| modern motherboard + 8GB RAM + 32GB flash (EDIT: 32MB, so meh).
| I'm sure once you did that you'd find something half the price,
| but when you consider the volumes involved...
| elihu wrote:
| Minor correction: the linked website says 32MB flash, not
| 32GB. Unless you meant 32GB flash for the micro-SD slot which
| is presumably sold separately for the SiFive board as it is
| with the RPi.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Oops, yeah, thanks for catching.
| justaguy88 wrote:
| It's inevitable that someone will make a RISC-V Pi one day
| CameronNemo wrote:
| PicoRio is aiming at the Pi price point, but its specs may be
| lower.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I dunno... I mean it's actually smart to not make this a
| single board machine with built-in GPU, since there isn't
| really a workable open GPU / display controller solution. So
| making it a PCIe host that can take any off the shelf GPU
| neatly solves this problem.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| _IF_ RISC-V ever gets big enough for economy of scales to
| kickin.
| Sphax wrote:
| Anyone know if they ship to Europe ? Or if there's a reseller in
| Europe.
| rwmj wrote:
| Yes, they are being distributed by Mouser.
| guerby wrote:
| Also here:
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sifive-r...
| 127 wrote:
| Will this lower the cost of manufacturing custom chips? Like
| fully manufactured PCB with components from JLCPCB is just a few
| bucks. Will the ASIC manufacturing process ever fall to that
| level?
| zachm0 wrote:
| Unlikely, manufacturing an ASIC is orders of magnitude more
| complex than manufacturing and assembling PCBs. At most this
| will reduce the price of whatever RISC-V chip is used on the
| board, and maybe increase the demand for more RISC-V chips in
| the future.
| jng wrote:
| Google recently opened up a full 130nm ASIC design platform,
| including core cells, tools, etc... Google it, can't remember
| the name right now. They've even committed to manufacturing
| silicon for free for a few select open source / open hardware
| projects. I guess that's going to turn into some kind of low-
| cost shuttle in the near future. That's probably the biggest
| movement towards democratizing ASIC design the way that JLCPCB
| and others have democratized PCB manufacturing (and assembly,
| as you mention, although with a quite restricted selection of
| available parts). Kicad democratized PCB design and it's being
| successfully used for many projects these days.
| jeff-davis wrote:
| Is this an early version of something that will be an end
| product? Or will it always be just for developers?
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I think that depends less on the device as it exists now and
| more on whether an OEM becomes interested in adapting it into a
| "real" product.
| rwmj wrote:
| This is mainly for developers, ie people porting their software
| and distributions to run on RISC-V, or doing builds, CI and
| similar.
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