| --- Log opened Mon Jul 18 00:00:44 2016 | ||
| mafm | olofk: do you remember where the chinese guy with the poster was coming from? | 15:23 |
|---|---|---|
| mafm | in the risc-v conf, I mean | 15:23 |
| mafm | also, probably you know if there's some component that can be readily used to drive video, even if not very fast? (custom accelerators, perhaps?) | 15:24 |
| olofk | mafm: Hi! Great to meet you at the conference. | 15:27 |
| olofk | Don't remember which one you mean. I spent most of the time at the poster session at my own poster, so I'm afraid I didn't even see all the posters | 15:28 |
| olofk | But if you're just looking for a simple frame buffer core, we usually use the vga_lcd core in most of the OpenRISC-based systems | 15:29 |
| olofk | It has a Linux driver, but it doesn't do any acceleration other than using DMA | 15:29 |
| mafm | olofk: same :-) | 15:40 |
| mafm | olofk: I was just wondering what kind of GPU lowRISC, Shakti or SiFive are going to use | 15:41 |
| olofk | aha | 15:48 |
| olofk | LowRISC just recently decided to add video output. They are having some interns writing one from scratch now if I understood it correctly | 15:49 |
| olofk | I would assume that SiFive writes one from scratch too. They don't seem very keen on reusing code | 15:49 |
| olofk | For shakti I have no idea unfortunately. They did a presentation at orconf last year. Maybe there is some info there. It should be on youtube if you have some time and popcorn :) | 15:50 |
| mafm | olofk: I was wondering if somebody would be reusing one of the GPUs like Mali | 15:51 |
| mafm | probably not lowRISC or SiFive though | 15:51 |
| olofk | I would guess it costs insane amounts of money to license something like Mali | 15:54 |
| olofk | But I think that LowRISC has been looking at miaow or nyuzi too actually | 16:08 |
| olofk | Nyuzi is already packaged for FuseSoC :) | 16:09 |
| mafm | olofk: I guessed that something was available from FuseSoC, that's why I asked you :-) | 16:18 |
| olofk | Nyuzi is pretty cool. He got a demo where he renders quake levels on his blog http://latchup.blogspot.se/2015/06/not-so-fast.html | 16:26 |
| olofk | Am I the only one who find it annoying that blogspot localises the URLs? | 16:28 |
| * mafm finds that annoying, too | 16:33 | |
| mafm | olofk: I am trying to convince the guy from eoma68 (do you know him?) about trying to use RISC-V in the future | 16:34 |
| olofk | Ah.. yeah.. I have read about eoma68 before, but haven | 16:35 |
| olofk | 't seen anything about it for a while | 16:35 |
| olofk | Is the CPU arch standardized too? I thought it was just the pinout | 16:37 |
| mafm | olofk: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop | 16:41 |
| olofk | Ah cool. It runs a Softbank Cortex A7? | 16:43 |
| olofk | I like the idea, but a looooot of technical challenges | 16:44 |
| mafm | olofk: allwinner a20, I think | 16:48 |
| mripard | the later Allwinner SoCs would probably have more appeal for this channel :) | 16:54 |
| mafm | the point of the eoma68 is more the standard interfaces, SoCs are swappable (if produced later) | 16:57 |
| olofk | mripard: Are those the one with the built-in OpenRISC? | 16:58 |
| olofk | mafm: Ah ok. I misunderstood you a bit then. I thought you wanted to have RISC-V specified in the eoma68 standard, but what you're looking for is to have a RISC-V-based SoC in the LibreTea device | 17:00 |
| mafm | actually, a compatible CPU-card could contain openrisc at its main core :D | 17:01 |
| mafm | olofk: there are people talking about using other cpu-cards with mips, or ICubeCorp (unknown to me), and I was pushing to have RISC-V into account | 17:02 |
| mripard | olofk: indeed | 17:02 |
| mripard | all the new ones comes with an openrisc core in addition to the arm ones | 17:03 |
| mripard | with access to all the devices in the SoC | 17:03 |
| olofk | mripard: I know that stekern did some research on this a while ago. I only remember that they were doing some weird endian swapping and faking the address space a bit. It's used for power management or something, right? | 17:06 |
| olofk | mafm: Yes, that would be cool. Problem is that there isn't any usable RISC-V silicon yet :/ | 17:07 |
| olofk | Would be awesome to have LowRISC there | 17:07 |
| olofk | So it still makes a lot more sense to just use a cheap Softbank SoC. | 17:08 |
| mafm | olofk: you say Softbank because they just bought ARM (I heard it vaguely on the radio)? | 17:12 |
| olofk | Yeah. I'm trying to keep up with the times | 17:13 |
| mafm | olofk: according to https://dev.sifive.com/documentation/freedom-u500-platform-guide/ , I had some hopes that it could be put in silicon ("The resulting customized U500 SoC is optimized for manufacture in a TSMC 28nm metal-gate process, and delivered as packaged tested parts by SiFive.") | 17:13 |
| mafm | I had never heard of softbank before | 17:13 |
| olofk | Me neither | 17:13 |
| olofk | It would be awesome if SiFive produced that one, but I haven't understood if they will just build it, or if they are waiting for a customer to actually want it first | 17:14 |
| mafm | I think that they mentioned the possibility of a kickstarter, but if somebody else wants to buy, they would probably be fine with it :D | 17:17 |
| olofk | Yeah. A kickstarter might be worth a shot, depending on how much money they need, and what they can make for it | 17:20 |
| olofk | They will probably run in to some of the same challenges that LowRISC has had. Hope to see both succeeding, and that they help each other | 17:21 |
| olofk | I know they do have a lot of collaboration already | 17:21 |
| olofk | I said it before, but the CPU is only one of the cores on a chip, and not necessarily the most complex one either. In my opinion there is far too much focus on the CPU compared to anything else | 17:22 |
| olofk | Except for buses of course. There seem to be a ton of NoCs and other interconnects right now | 17:23 |
| Laksen | Where? | 17:24 |
| Laksen | I've never really seen any real bus interconnects anywhere | 17:25 |
| olofk | Oh god | 17:31 |
| olofk | :) | 17:31 |
| Laksen | Did I miss something? | 17:32 |
| olofk | Wishbone, AXI4, AHB, TileLink, HopLite, TileLink, LISNoC | 17:36 |
| olofk | Ok, perhaps I didn't have to mention TileLink twice :) | 17:37 |
| olofk | That's probably an indication that I should get to sleep now | 17:38 |
| kc5tja | Still a fan of Wishbone overall. | 18:55 |
| --- Log closed Tue Jul 19 00:00:45 2016 | ||
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