RISC-V

[Xyzzy]

https://www.techpowerup.com/274024/r...elopment-board

https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V

Unlike most other ISA designs, the RISC-V ISA is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use.

[M344587487]

It's a good step, but RISC-V is still many years from being viable in a consumer chip. That board is for evaluation and jumpstarting dev efforts and is still a few orders of magnitude off price-wise. No one's stepped up and mass-produced a design for consumer adoption yet, that may not be realistic anytime soon because the majority of consumers require an iGPU and unless I'm out of the loop that looks to be a bit of a problem.

[Mark Rose]

I was looking at that yesterday, and it's nice they finally have a useful desktop board. It would be fun to run that as a novelty.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://www.techpowerup.com/274024/r...elopment-board

https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V

[borat]Very nice[/borat]

[Xyzzy]

https://www.mouser.com/new/sifive/sifive-hifive/

[paulunderwood]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://www.mouser.com/new/sifive/sifive-hifive/

At £515.31 what is the advantage of this board other than openness?

I have ordered a Sipeed Longan Nano RISC-V GD32VF103CBT6 for £6.70 in order to play with the RISC-V instruction set. It supports RV32IMAC instruction set.

[Xyzzy]

Originally Posted by paulunderwood

At £515.31 what is the advantage of this board other than openness?

It looks like fun!

Other kinda-related news: https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/picor...er-for-risc-v/

[paulunderwood]

Originally Posted by paulunderwood

I have ordered a Sipeed Longan Nano RISC-V GD32VF103CBT6 for £6.70 in order to play with the RISC-V instruction set. It supports RV32IMAC instruction set.

Ahead or the delivery of my Sipeed Longan Nano, I have started programming a RISC-V assembly code library for arbitrary precision arithmetic as a basis of doing some speudoprimaility tests. I have written array_add and array_mul so far -- though I need the device for debugging purposes.

The tools I am using are Visual Studio Code with the PlatformIO plug-in which deals with uploads to the Longan Nano.

I found some easy to follow learning material on the net, including YouTube,

[paulunderwood]

My Longan Nano arrived today. Now I can start debugging my arbitrary arithmetic code. I have a RISC-V book on order -- the one with a picture of Mona Lisa on the front.

Edit: I now need a usb-c cable. Also for another £3 I could have got a LCD display and a case

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by paulunderwood

My Longan Nano arrived today. Now I can start debugging my arbitrary arithmetic code. I have a RISC-V book on order -- the one with a picture of Mona Lisa on the front.

Edit: I now need a usb-c cable. Also for another £3 I could have got a LCD display and a case

Ha! That board is just a $3-$4 "-ino" board, many vendors have. We use similar toys from STM in our daily job. You can PM us your address and we can send you few. Don't expect a lot of performance, haha, I mean I know that Risc-V is about 10% to 15% "innate" faster than Cortex-M (i.e. clock per clock), and that the core consumption in run mode could be about a half, to a third, of a Cortex-M core, depending on what you do with it, but the peripherals (timers, etc) inside are the same, and at the end, this is just a board running at 48MHz or so, so you can't do much with it. Next step would be to put together 960 of them and give them TF work (in such a way, for a given p and bitlevel, each will work a single class of k's from the 960 classes). They will consume about 30 mW per chip, which is about 28 Watt, and if you make 10 such contraptions, you will get the performance of an average-to-high-end GPU, for the same power consumption. Except, this will cost you to build (at ~$0.6 per chip if you buy large qty) about $6000.

[paulunderwood]

Thanks for the offer, but I want to concentrate on RISC-V for now -- that is complicated enough! I like the way every thing is open, with architecture diagrams etc. I will be reading my RISC-V book and debugging my code when the usb-c cable arrives.