[Approved] RISCY BUSINESS (RISC-V dev + live stream)

Genuinely brought a tear to my eye. Already the memories!
You can get real RISC-V hardware chip now: https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-v
Open-V will be first hardware microcontroller using RISC-V ISA, and it is fully open-source.
Awesome, hadn't seen open-v. Looks like they intend to be shipping chips by 2018 if they meet their funding goal.
The one I've been keeping my eye on is lowRISC http://www.lowrisc.org/
They intend to finish their design this year, and have the following in their faq:
When can I buy a lowRISC SoC?

As with most tech projects, the most accurate answer is “When it’s ready”. However, it’s useful to consider some of the main milestones:

Release of an initial FPGA version: Done! See the tagged memory release and the untethered release.
Production of a test chip: we expect to tape out a test chip during the course of 2016.
Tape out of production silicon: this is likely to happen, at the earliest, a year after the first test chip (in 2017).
Just discovered the HiFive1, and added it to the hardware section of the FAQ.
Haha, $8,953 raised of $1 goal, 895,300% funded.
Well, a RISC-V chip called HiFive1, how could I possibly refuse this opportunity? We could totally get 4coder, Motion Box and Milton up and running on it, right? Or, failing that, at least weechat, so we can invoke !hi5 from the HiFive1?
Yeah I will be playing with the hifive1 on the series :)

I'd like to keep what we do with it on the software side so that people can follow along without having to buy the hardware, but I guess it depends on what kind of projects the community wants to see with it. I think porting Milton to it would be a lot of fun. 4coder isn't fully open-source is it? We'd probably have to collaborate with Allen if we wanted to get it running on RISC-V. I could see MotionBox being doable in the future. !hi5 from the HiFive1 will be the top priority of course ;D

I believe the tier I backed ships late this month, so we may have hardware to play with on stream before we are even ready for it!
What does get it "running on RISC-V" means? First it needs to run some kind of OS, right? If it runs Linux, then there's no porting at all - just install required packages & compile (as long as source code doesn't use some kind of inline assembly).

Edited by Mārtiņš Možeiko on
Yeah we'll be using Linux. I believe Milton uses some SSE intrinsics; popcorn tried building it on his raspberry pi and ran into that.
Ah, I see. Not sure why though - I understand its all OpenGL rendering now.
mmozeiko
Ah, I see. Not sure why though - I understand its all OpenGL rendering now.


It may be that it no longer uses SIMD, or that a software rendering path is still lingering in the code? I don't know for sure, it could be that SIMD is being used for some other optimization as well. We'll find out once we get there :)

In other news, here is a video of HiFive1 boards on the assembly line: https://player.vimeo.com/video/195871404

There is still a chance to get founder's edition/early access boards, they increased the number of them being produced due to demand!

RISC-V hardware has arrived!
Hey, you are probably aware of it, but I stumbled on this RISCV emulator by browsing at Bellard's page (seems relatively new) :
http://bellard.org/riscvemu/