cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/36499892

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/36499694

Hope everyone is having a relaxing Sunday morning/evening.

I wanted to follow up from my previous post, as some of you have indicated interest.

About logistic considerations, I believe 8 weeks is a good time commitment for a hardware project. The goal is to learn more about silicon manufacturing, lower-level computer hardware details such as architecture, circuit design, fundamental condensed matter physics, and digital logic design. Other goals involve understanding firmware systems such as BIOS and the cascade of events that occur from power-on to user operation as well as conceptualizing the small timescales that these events occur on. My intention is not to dictate the philosophy of learning, but bring awareness to details that otherwise would have never been known or to draw a larger picture using the constellation of components that is a modern computing device. We then will delve into HDLs (Hardware description languages) and look specifically at the VHDL (Verilog HDL) for how to design a chip. This is where my understanding of what is out there becomes fuzzy.

We will need a repository to store documents. It is not my intention to use Google Drive. Is there a trusted platform that offers this functionality? I am also curious as to learning a VCS (Version Control System). Git seems to be the choice for this. Maintaining our codebase, resources/references, questions/comments, presentations, notes, and miscellaneous documents in some platform that does not infringe on user privacy. Any ideas in this domain?

Individual development environments are also crucial to a productive hobby/working session. I think it'd be fun to discuss IDEs, TUI environments, barebones software to accomplish simple tasks, CLI navigation, file system implementation, and drive partitioning. Some of you are adept TUI text editor users, which your expertise would be greatly appreciated.

Because this is Lemmy, I assume most of us are interested in FOSS software/hardware. Perhaps there are open source architectures for GPUs, RAM devices, and other fundamental computing units.

Is there a such thing as open source RAM architectures? Is that even the correct question to pose? I see that "OpenRAM" exists for ASIC design. Maybe we can have an ultra-specific computing task that we could optimize all the constituent hardware pieces to perform. Maybe a game engine for a programming project, but where we patchwork the pieces, or at least examine the guts of Godot together. I've found that discussing how one actually READS documentation, can be helpful in becoming more independent during information searching.

Apologies if some parts are still unclear. I'm just happy to see some of you are interested! As per the survey and what you'd like to get out of something like this, or if the idea needs other parts glued together, feel free to suggest them here. Looking forward to your feedback.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.cl/post/3171211

cross-posted from: https://feddit.cl/post/3120695

My unfunded speculation is that this will quite expensive and a bit hard to boot other thing different that Ubuntu.

Title. Just curious since apparently risc-v is mentioned as a "ultra low power draw" CPU... so I'd like to know if that is true. Thanks in advance.

RISC-V intl. announces plans to add matrix multiplication to the ISA, in an attempt to turn the architecture into a general-purpose solution for all processor derivatives eg. GPUs, TPUs, DSPs, Security Processors, Power management processors.

This isn't a rip on RISC-V but it's something I notice a lot with ARM and RISC SBCs compared to x86, which seems to support Linux, Windows, MacOS regardless of the device specs.

On other platforms, the developers have to build special iso images for each device, even though the underlying OS supports the whole architecture.

If I wanted to move to a new device (say, upgrade my Raspberry pi 4B to an Orange Pi, or other RISC-V alternatives) I'd have to ensure the new device had support from my OS choice, download a new image for it, and manually port stuff across. (as far as I can tell).

What's the technical reason that x86 can configure the OS on the fly but ARM/RISC can't?

This seems to be a good summary of the recent RISC-V conference in China.

Top quotes from the article :

Data shows that by 2022, the cumulative shipment of RISC-V chips worldwide reached 10 billion.

According to Counterpoint Research's prediction, by 2025, the cumulative shipment of RISC-V processors will exceed 80 billion units, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 114.9%. By then, RISC-V will account for 14% of the global CPU market, 28% of the IoT market, 12% of the industrial market, and 10% of the automotive market.

According to research firm Semico, the number of RISC-V chips is expected to grow by a CAGR of 73.6% from 2023 to 2027, producing approximately 25 billion AI chips based on the RISC-V, with revenues reaching $291 billion.

Beijing Open Source Chip (BOSC) announced the second generation "XiangShan", an open-source high-performance RISC-V processor core, which has surpassed ARM A76 in performance... "Nanhu" architecture has completed "productization transformation"... In 2022, two companies have applied "Xiangshan-Nanhu". One of them has taped out the chips and will receive samples in September this year, and another will tape out in the second half of this year.

The third-generation "Kunminghu" architecture is under development, and its performance can be comparable to ARM Neoverse N2. Xiangshan-Kunminghu has a chance to reach the level of high-performance processor cores of ARM two or three years ago, but it is only in terms of performance. Its area and power consumption, where ARM has a strong advantage, still need to be optimized.

Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A RISC-V SBC review and Debian demo. This is the first RISC-V computer I’ve tested that's provided a usable desktop computing experience right out of the box. End-user RISC-V is starting to arrive! :)

You can learn more about the Lichee Pi 4A on its web page here: https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a

And the board has excellent documentation here: https://wiki.sipeed.com/licheepi4a.html

Note that the hardware I used in this video was purchased from AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10050...

I have reviewed four previous RISC-V SBCs, including the StarFive VisionFive 2, which also (after some messing around) provides a good desktop experience:

• VisionFive 2: RISC-V Quad Core Low Co...

I also have an 2023 update on RISC-V developments here:

• RISC-V 2023 Update: From Embedded Com...

And my general introduction to RISC-V is here:

• Explaining RISC-V: An x86 & ARM Alter...

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More videos on computing and related topics can be found at:

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Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:45 Unboxing 03:33 Specifications 07:26 First Boot 10:37 Debian Demo 18:10 Another Milestone

Somebody made a list of RiscV SBCs

“My belief is in the next 5 to 10 years, RISC-V will take over all the data centers,” Keller told EE Times