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Comment by gaze | Hacker News Reader

They best not be suggesting that they run a RISC-V in the fpga.

It's the fifth bullet point in the list at the top of the page.

Either they buy a risc-v chip someone taped out or they synthesize one in the FPGA. The latter will be competitive with 10-20 year old technology.

I'm planning on using a soft-core processor because FPGA dev boards are plentiful and relatively inexpensive. My plans are to await silicon from LowRISC project before considering real glass.

Perhaps the goal is to eventually implement an ASIC version.

Tapeouts are many, many millions for something that will compete with anything in even your phone

Yeah, I know. I didn't expect the goal to be reasonable.

Nothing about the project is really all that reasonable, considering FPGAs are nearly entirely proprietary across the board, and because it'd be super expensive to make something that is actually truly open.

But good for them for trying something new.

> "Nothing about the project is really all that reasonable, considering FPGAs are nearly entirely proprietary across the board, and because it'd be super expensive to make something that is actually truly open."

The Kestrel-4 plans to use the ICE-40 as one of its platforms, and at the time of writing this the ICE-40 FPGA family is the most open of all FPGA devices (fully open source development toolchain, etc...).

https://kestrelcomputer.github.io/kestrel/2016/04/01/announc...

Are you sure that's not an april fools hoax?

Why would it be? ICE-40 has a port of a RISC-V CPU. I couldn't see anything that would indicate it was an April Fool's joke, aside from the date.

Did you see the specs? He went from a Commodore to a NUMA-scale machine that he will implement on a mix of Xilinx and ICE FPGA's. Not saying he can't do some fraction of it but those are some heavy specs.

After reading it again, you're all quite right, I was wrong, it's an April Fool's joke. Still, the principal of a computer on an ICE FPGA is a good one, even if it's not currently being pursued by this guy.

I'd like to try my hand at building my own iCE40-based motherboard for the Kestrel some day, but something like that would be at least two to three years into the future minimum, especially at my current rate of progress working solo. It's best to not have any expectations.

Sure, but he doesn't have to fund it himself, other groups have expressed an interest in creating a RISC-V ASIC, he could use one of those chips when it's ready.

That's the plan.

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