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Re: [f-cpu] F-CPU SoC



Hi Kim !

Le 2015-04-02 22:35, Kim Enkovaara a ÃcritÂ:
That's quite a "niche" market :-)
It's exciting but we're not there...
it's already a challenge to make a single CPU work :-D

I would say that single core is niche market today except on IoT side
where u/nW power consumption is needed.
There are still countless applications that work well with a single CPU core :-)

Single core performance has
reached its peak in many cases and power density and other problems on
die force to multicore. Not that fun to SW side, but it is the
reality. Many have already bitten the bullet.
It also depends on the type of the workload.

F-CPU was created initially for desktop use, I think,
and I believe that emphasis should be on a well integrated
development environment, to differentiate it from other
"open source cores".

Paralellism will appear when we'll have one core working.
Then we'll fill the FPGA with new instances :-P

"niche" CPU such as NPUs strive in their "niche" domain...
I've heard there are several "tile" CPUs out there.
The modern NPU architectures are multicore ARM arrays with some
accelerators and very fast internal communication networks. You are
thinking the previous generation where they had a lot of special
tricks. Datacenter vs. gNPU differences are actually quite small.
but do you imagine F-CPU as a NPU tile ?
We can't reasonably access all the resources needed to build an array...
unless you let us play with your toys, but then, nobody else would
be able to reuse our work, so what's the point ?

The name of the project says "freedom" explicitly, to me it comes
before performance.
The product has to be competitive.
against what ?
the only thing F-CPU competes against is Duke Nukem Forever and The Hurd.
It's one of the mythic vaporwares of the geek world :-P

I don't believe F-CPU can compete on performance or price because
proprietary solutions fight to keep that edge.
However we can work hard for ease of use, so even beginners
can play with it and start to implement it in their projects.
That's how severa technologies started...

 as network processing is also quite hot topic ;)
how many degrees today ? :-D
Intel (Axxia aquisition and rumors of Altera aquisition), Cavium,
Broadcom, Ezchip (NPS/Tilera), Freescale (LS), Marvell and few others
yep, these names ring a bell ;-)

all competing with super high performance multicore SoCs... pretty hot ;)
and who's your favorite ?

--Kim
yg
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