Design Your Own CPU!!! SiFive Studio Tour

[AlexTheGreatish]

Thanks to SiFive for sponsoring this video!  Check our their core designer at https://www.sifive.com/core-designer

[Speed Weed]

[Deaderpool]

[kuhnertdm]

That tagline in the intro gave me horrid flashbacks to elementary school computer class.

[Wh0_Am_1]

Most people would probably go: Meh, it runs YouTube... What's the big deal? My thoughts are: An open source CPU runs YouTube?!!!!!!! Amazing!!!!

 

 

[kuhnertdm]

Re: That ending bit - I think you guys may be underestimating the disconnect between "people who think chip design is cool" and "people who will know how to actually use the output in an FPGA or something". You're probably going to end up with a lot of people saying "Okay, I specified what I want in a CPU, and got a Verilog file downloaded to my computer. Now what?"

[AlexTheGreatish]

11 minutes ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Most people would probably go: Meh, it runs YouTube... What's the big deal? My thoughts are: An open source CPU runs YouTube?!!!!!!! Amazing!!!!

 

 

This is the hardest thing about the two RISC-V videos, I'm here being like "OMF THIS IS INSANE!!!" but the background knowledge for it to be amazing is so huge

[ZeroDayGG]

yeah the background knowledge is immense. The fact that you guys are putting this kinda content out there is going to turn a lot more people onto it. Myself included.

 

I may just have to change degree paths now

Edited December 5, 2018 by ZeroDayGG

[Ganelon]

 

Scissors.

[Kroon]

Whats up with the aspect ratio of this video?  Black borders on bottom and top? It looks really wrong, bad even.

[sydh]

Awesome to see the progress on this is definitely pushing forward since the last video.

[poochyena]

yea sorry but i'm downvoting until the aspect ratio is fixed.

[Granular]

RISC-V is not a 'CPU architecture', it's an instruction set architecture.

RISC-V is not the first open source ISA, just the first promising one.

Open source doesn't automatically mean no licensing fees.

And it's not like SiFive having an existing relationship with TSMC means they can get TSMC to tape out a handful of their customer's custom chips. The minimum order quantity is still going to be 'a metric ton'.

That said, RISC-V Foundation is doing God's a democratic government's work and I wish SiFive all the best, so that one day I could replace my x86 servers and laptop with competitive open source devices.

[williamcll]

When will LTT release their own CPU?

[Tech Tycoons]

does these custom cpu's from sifive compatible with regular motherboards and other pc components?

[jetnoodles]

probably not regular motherboards

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

8 hours ago, Tech Tycoons said:

does these custom cpu's from sifive compatible with regular motherboards and other pc components?

No, they are not compatible at all.

Image below is a Raspberry Pi with an ARM SoC. Right now most performing RiscV implementation are around the level of performance where you can run a desktop linux to some level.
 

 

Being able to connect pheriperals, is one thing, a huge problem is driver support, for which there is virtually none. Think of the Linus Linux challenge times 100X (they are running linux on X86-64) with ARM you need repositiories for some kind of ARM64 ISA binaries or recompile and hope it works. With RiscV, good luck. 

I think the best driver support you can have for mainstream hardware on NON-X86-64 is likely for the Apple M1. Support for common IO pheriperals like mouse keyboards and controller shouldn't be a problem, while support for hardcore stuffs like Directx/Opengl/Vulcan on a discrete GPU on PCIE is likely a nightmare. Again, Apple Metal/Vulkan/Rosetta on their GPU tiles is the best shot. I think you can pretty much forget support for more exotic propietary pheriperals unless you want to do the Linux community hobby of reverse engineering/porting/integration.

Below a video on what you can expect right now from a commercial Risc-V board you can perhaps buy

Intel IS working on real high performace Risc-V processors. I would bet on a future Intel Risc-V core becoming a beast for power efficiency, especially with Intel engineering behind the core design and driver support, but that's really a crystal ball bet.