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Re: [f-cpu] F-CPU SoC
On Wed, 1 Apr 2015, whygee@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
So I'm proposing for the following - let's think about how a F-CPU-based
SoC should look like.
The trick is : it will look like what is needed in each specific case.
There will be no "one true" F-CPU SoC, but adaptations of a generic model...
The SoC aspect is the most important one. In the embedded market the chip
peripherials have been the most important thing to sell the design. Intel
has been the only succesful one to make chips with very bare bones
peripherials (Atom has them for some markets).
And the future looks like the switch fabric between the cores/chips is a
major competition area. There are already chips under work with hunderds of
cores which have cache coherent memory and very low latencies inside the
chip, and also possibility to connect multiple chips together. And those
cores usually have zero latency thread switching so the parallelism is
exploding. Of course I'm looking this from networking side, but the
designs also aim to other areas like datacenters.
So the current innovation is in the switch fabrick, memory hierarchies,
thread switch latencies etc. The core instruction set is not that
interesting. I would even say that ARM and x86 instruction sets will kill
all others quite quickly, it is already visible (PPC is slowly dying,
MIPS is not doing that well, FPGAs get ARM hard cores and their soft
cores become less important etc.).
I'm totally convinced that a single design won't
be able to answer all needs, so probably the most logical approach is to
define several different SoC types and then discuss each F-CPU feature
and how it can fits into each specific context.
So more or less it's about creating a catalogue of blocks and units
that work along/with the CPU. Users will pick the ones they need...
Users would even want to chose the units and configure them
with an interactive graphic tool, no ? :-)
The bus structure for that is critical and that is not simple thing to
solve. Many companies have poured a lot of money into this. Single core is
not interecting anymore even for very low end.
In addition to the SoC topic - I personally think that a CPU design is
less and less important only by itself,
I agree. The tools are critical.
in F-CPU, the tools are not just critical, but they must also be free.
I also agree, as I see many vendors ditching their own architectures.
and there are tons of other
blocks that need to orchestrate perfectly with the CPU in order to
achieve a usable performance out of the system. So would be great if we
consider touching the SoC topic sooner than later.
I agree, so let's move on to the F-GPU implementation.
Or F-NPU, as network processing is also quite hot topic ;) And the
interactions are pretty similar as GPU can also be used for network
acceleration.
--Kim
ps. still the same e-mail address, but not that involced in cpu designs
anymore, currently chief architect for terabit level routers ;)
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