Resurrecting the SuperH architecture

Posted Jun 17, 2015 22:17 UTC (Wed) by palmer (subscriber, #84061)
In reply to: Resurrecting the SuperH architecture by lsl
Parent article: Resurrecting the SuperH architecture

I'm super biased (I work on both Chisel, RISC-V, and Rocket at Berkeley), but if you're interested in hardware development then I'd suggest taking a look at Chisel, the Rocket infastructure, and RISC-V. You get some software (Linux, GCC, glibc, binutils, newlib, Python) in addition to BSD-licensed RTL for a machine that is competitive with ARM's A5 core (on the same technology, we're a bit better DMIPS/MHz, energy/op, and area). The provided RTL boots a full Linux system, including L1/L2 caches, an MMU and a floating-point unit. We regularly synthesize for some fairly inexpensive FPGA boards (and with any luck a really cheap one will be up and running soon) and have taped out 10 chips on both 28nm and 45nm, which reach 1.5GHz.

The website <http://riscv.org/> has more info, including a cookbook-style introduction <http://riscv.org/getting-started.html> and a set of slides describing the system in more detail <http://riscv.org/tutorial-hpca2015.html>. We're holding our second workshop very soon, registration is free for academics but filling up quickly.

Resurrecting the SuperH architecture

Posted Jun 20, 2015 3:05 UTC (Sat) by roskegg (subscriber, #105) [Link] (1 responses)

Thank you for that information. Do you know of anyone working on an open source GPU design? DSPs of all sorts are good especially for video and audio, but I haven't heard of anyone doing a GPU. The current state of graphics hardware scares me from a security point of view. Not necessarily because it is bad, but because in the past 10 years I haven't heard any announcements that anyone has fixed the problems on the hardware side. So, silence implies nothing has changed. I hope you have good news. Or that you know a GPU designer I can talk to offline.

Resurrecting the SuperH architecture

Posted Jun 20, 2015 17:00 UTC (Sat) by palmer (subscriber, #84061) [Link]

You should come to the RISC-V retreat! We should be launching a general-purpose vector ISA extension there. We've been building vector machines that have a significantly better energy/op that GPUs do for GPGPU sorts of tasks for a while now, so we've at least got something along the same lines as a GPU. There has been lots of interest in a RISC-V GPU, I personally think the best way to go about this would be to port mesa to the vector machine and then see what needs to go faster.

This is probably a discussion better had either in person or via the RISC-V mailing lists, I don't want to hijack this thread too much :)