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Comment by jhgb | Hacker News Reader

I haven't studied it in detail but my mental picture of RISC-V is it being an attempt at a modern, clean, patent-unencumbered ISA suitable for use from microcontrollers to large systems. The suitability progress in this effort may naturally be uneven (low-power microcontrollers with "straightforward" basic implementations would be usable long before large SMP servers with wide out-of-order cores and powerful atomics and IPC features, for example).

At this point, it would be very lovely and educational to see an Oberon system (http://www.projectoberon.com/) ported to these small boards. (It could definitely use more memory to run a desktop system, though.)

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There was the OberonStation,

http://oberonstation.x10.mx/

Then there was the Sceptre board, but it went out quite fast.

https://www.elektormagazine.com/labs/easy-sceptre-programmin...

But given Astrobe, there are a few more boards to target.

Oberon will also run on this [1].

[1] http://saanlima.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&pr...

Thanks.

Posting the direct link for the Oberon image.

http://www.saanlima.com/pepino/index.php?title=Pepino_Oberon

More memory, and a video controller. (I can imagine a PS/2 port implemented through GPIO, but a video controller can only be done using a separate chip.)

Overall I think it would be neat to see a "hackable" (2D) video controller emerge too. There are quite a lot of "small systems" that could use with an easy way to get decent video out (practically speaking HDMI, or maybe DP).

A special chip isn't really needed for this, an FPGA can do all of the above (with the correct bitstream)

Fpga, discrete asic, or on-die on soc, that's just implementation detail. Of course I'd expect the first iterations to be fpga based, that's almost unavoidable these days.

A display controller that can drive HDMI and a 2D graphics accelerator are different things. They just both work from the same framebuffer in a SoC's memory.

Software-generated video is definitely difficult to get working from scratch, limited in resolution, and expensive in CPU cycles, but it's been done on several microcontroller families [1] [2] [3]. You generally still need an external resistor network to do the D/A conversion, though.

[1] http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/sx/gamesys.php

[2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/03/avr-vga-generation...

[3] https://hackaday.io/project/8537-vga-blinking-lights

Makes sense, I guess I shouldn't really assume otherwise, that's how ARM is used these days. I hope we'll see some competition on the actual microcontrollers and stuff to push that price down further.

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