Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the but-who's-gonna-stamp-it-out dept.
Harry Houdini writes "EETimes has a
story about how OpenCores is offering a free 32-bit processor IP core
in a move that could undermine such commercial
IP licensors as ARM and MIPS. "
A few months ago, we already read about a similar situation with SPARC processors. Granted Sun released an older version of the SPARC processor and they also released it under their SCSL license, but nonetheless..
I think it's cool that they release this kind of information. Unfortunately, who the heck has the resources to punch out one of these things besides the major chip manufacturers anyway? Maybe if someone was really bored and had a very large bread board (and a lot of spare time and cash on their hands) they could brew one up out of ICs and other solid state components. Probably run hotter than a docker's arm pit and use more energy than you can shake a stick at. Interesting, regardless.
--
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Re:SPARC already has done it
by
stripes
·
· Score: 4
Unfortunately, who the heck has the resources to punch out one of these things besides the major chip manufacturers anyway?
For a MicroSPARC? I would guess that you need full custom logic, which isn't that expensave if you are buying tens of thousands of the device. It's suck if you want, say, three.
For the OpenCore CPU? That one is being targeted at FPGAs, which cost a small number of thousands (like two-ish) allready soddered on a PCI bord and ready for love (this would be for the million-gate-ish FPGAs). The "smaller" FPGAs, like 10k to 200k gates are available for way cheep, like under $10 for some of them (with 100k gates even!), very few over $100.
Remember that the first SPARC implmentation was a 20K gate array, it ran at about 10MIPS if the wind was going it's way (Sun 4/110). So you can probbably design a low speed CPU on a $5 FPGA and have room for a USB interface. Spend $40 and you have room for some periphrials too.
Unfortunitly the hard part is the dev tools. Many cost over $100k. I don't know of any Open Source FPGA design tools. Wish I did. I would love to design a non VHDL language!
For FPGA examples and prices look at xilinx. Not sure where to go to look for software pricing.
EETimes has a story about how OpenCores is offering a free 32-bit processor IP core in a move that could undermine such commercial IP licensors as ARM and MIPS.
I'm delighted to hear that someone's actually making headway on this sort of thing, but...
That headline sounds dangerously like undermining ARM and MIPS is regarded as a positive acheivement because what they're doing is fundamentally evil. It isn't, and posting that sort of thing on the front page of slashdot only helps alienate business from the open development community. If we're going to succeed, we need their help sometimes.
Greg
--
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant) Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Software for designing opencores?
by
gargle
·
· Score: 4
Is there good free software to go along with the "opencore"?. i.e. Verilog simulators, Xilinx/Altera style digital design software,etc.? These software packages are quite expensive, and without good free software equivalents to go along with the free cpu designs, the whole thing is pretty much pointless for the hobbyist.
OK, we won that whole open software thing. Hardware? Time to start stressing the importance of "free, as in beer":) heh heh
A lawyer comments
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5
As a practicing attorney at a leading IP firm, may I be the first to congratulate these kids on what they have achieved? To liberate intellectual property from other people, to destroy the value of their IP and to do it all wholly legally is truly an inspiring achievement.
Could I perhaps, however, blow the trumpet for my own profession and point out that the entire IP edifice which made this possible was the creation of lawyers? It was lawyers who created the statute and precedent which makes a viable IP solution to the issues raised by the GPL and Opencores possible. Without dedicated IP lawyers, Opencores would be mired in a sea of uncertain intellectual property rights. Even though I believe that the firm itself got its advice from some punky West-Coast firm, it is firmly in the grand legal tradition of IP law invented over the last two hundred years, ever since the writing of the US Constitution itself, the first document to introduce the concept of a civil patent.
Lawyers. You don't have to love us, but we gave you IP in all its glory.
John S Montoya, formerly known as streetlawyer.
PS: I used to curse a lot on this site, but my firm now has a firewall on all email messages. Any of you young geniuses know how to get round it?
Re:free as in hardware? not free beer
by
dattaway
·
· Score: 5
People like you are going to keep the open source movement from advancing.
Don't be so paranoid. There's a reason why open source became adopted by many people.
Take a trip back to 1997. Windows was so buggy and it wasn't just me. Everyone else was losing data and lost time. Remember when NT was released? NT 3.5? If that wasn't enough, remember NT 4.0? At work too. Viruses were rampant. I was afraid to look at someone else's computer for fear it would break out and catch something. My computer was in isolation and its inbred closed operating system still crashed. It was the shits.
Only because many of the show stopping bugs have been found in Windows that many people are able to find it completely tolerable. I won't return to Windows, because now I see its a closed source trap.
Open source has gotten a lot of attention lately not because it is economically free, but because companies/people are profitting off of it.
People are making a profit off it? Great; however, I make my money doing something else, but when computers crash, it makes my job harder. That's why I enjoy the stability and open nature of free software.
Open hardware design is great for people like me who often find a need to work with existing machines and adapt them to the changing needs we have. Open things open up opportunities. If they close them, find another line of work.
hehe, I just thought of something
by
aheitner
·
· Score: 5
If you want a Free implementation of an ARM-compatible CPU, just turn to anyone in the CMU ECE dept. who has taken 18-347 (the 2nd level processor-design course). The semester-long project in that course is to implement an ARM-compatible CPU in Verilog. Structural in the fall, procedural in the spring:)
They don't synthesize them (no real point), but they run them in simulation, and you can write assembly or use the GNU ARM compiler to make code for it. I believe (haven't taken the course yet) they give you a few of the more complex parts to save time (I think they give you the FPU). You write the rest in your project groups.
Just have to talk someone in the class into releasing their code under a Free license. Have to check about any restrictions on any code they were given to use, tho
It's very easy to fab chips these days. Lots of companies are out there doing custom chips for various applications (ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits). All of those companies have a premium on fast design, and getting the hardware right on the first fab run (since that's a very expensive and time consuming step). And all of these companies use outside fabs to actually make the chips.
So you can take these OpenRISC designs over to your favorite fab company, and just have a bunch made. Motorola does this (for pretty big orders). There are quite a few others. It's not even that expensive; professors here at CMU get their experimental designs fabbed (in small quantities) when they're ready.
But what's even cooler is to get a nice Xilinx or Altera FPGA, and just download the chip on there. That's how the designers work. It's not the most price effective (a good enough FPGA board will cost you a couple k, and you need the synthesis software, and a good copy of Verilog or VHDL) but it's way more fun, since you can play with the chip yourself and change it around. We did this (with a pretty simple chip design) in my 18-240 class.
What's more important is that there's plenty of competition for fabbing chips, so the market is good for consumers (rather unlike the traditional chip market). So you're likely to get a considerably better deal. You can't get the absolute latest.18 micron copper process (unless you wann pay IBM to fab for you, and I bet they're steep). But lots of guys have pretty good.25u stuff. Band together with some friends and get an order going!
[sigh] too bad the OpenRISC is all VHDL and I only know Verilog, or I'd take it over to the lab here and see if I could get it on the university's FPGAs:)
But this could end up really changing the way hardware is made and sold. Remember, there are a lot of university ECE departments cranking out good work, and looking for research projects to work on (check out the OpenRISC 2000 on the OpenCores website). The origin of all of UNIX, and more recently of Linux, was people at university CS depts. looking for fun stuff to hack on... all it takes is projects in CVS for the collaboration to begin...
I read this article yesterday and was pleased to see a downloadable 6502 in VHDL and DES encoder on another linked site from the article (http://www.free-ip.com/).
The site that got the most discussion in the article about the RISC core seemed to me to be mostly vapour. Click those links on the left of the site (eagerly reproduced in an earlier post) and you'll see most of them are in the pre-discussion phase, let alone coding.
Bruce Perens or somesuch said it best a few months ago, put out your code first before the vapour.
-Andy
Doomed Free Software projects ... and success
by
Nicolas+MONNET
·
· Score: 5
Ever since I started using free software (5 years ago?), I've seen people on the net starting apparently impossible projects. You say to yourself, naah, they'll never make it. FYI: I thought that when I heard about The Gimp for the first time. Imagine my surprise when I installed the RPM 2 years later. I thought that when I heard about WorldForge last year on slashdot. I thought that about opencores -- they have a working chip now. I thought that about Freedows -- hey, they failed.
Overall, you've gotta respect people with grandiose ideas. They are the ones who achieve the greatest things. Or may not. One thing is sure, if you're not slightly megalomaniac, you can't do it, or even understand it.
First Phase; to design and to manufacture a prototype of a computer system in a form of a PCI card that will run GNU/Linux:
we define a design and verification methodologies we design a library of small reusable components such as adders, multipliers etc we design a basic set of IP cores (microprocessor, PCI and SDRAM controller and communication controllers) we design and manufacture a prototype board with several hundred thousand gates FPGAs we support our microprocessor architecture with a port of GNU C Compiler, GNU Binutils, GNU Debugger and architectural/implementation simulator we support our microprocessor architecture with a port of Linux kernel
This is a project that should have been started a looooooong time ago. Of course the monetary barrier of entry was quite high, but that's all changed....next we'll have LinBoard with the LinProcessor....ooooooh, and all open sourced...
also i just wanted to point out that this is/much/ more then JUST Processor cores...check out this list of stuff:
Comm Controllers ATM AALx Eth MAC 10Mbps FireWire IP Engine Serial UART USB Controller
I believe there are a number of reasons free hardware just won't work like free software. I could be (and actually, hope I am) wrong, but here goes:
Chips don't have a near-zero replication cost
With software, 99+% of the cost lies in the development and documentation of a software package. Distribution is virutally free, and the economies of scale are pretty ideal. This is not the case in hardware, especially on high-end chips; Many of these chips cost $50-$150 each to fabricate, when die size, yield, package, etc. are factored in. So the development costs for leading edge technology is an extremely small chunk of the overall cost of the chip.
Compare this to software, where the bandwidth cost of transmitting a new linux kernel tarball or the presseing cost of a distro CD is pennies or less, and that's a very significant difference. The lack of a significant replication cost is a key reason free software works; there's no real monetary risk involved in distributing CD's.
Chip design is not terribly modular
Yes, you can seperate the areas of a chip out into different boxes and define interfaces, etc., but even the best writting verilog is still fairly spaghetti-like. There are global signals that run everywhere, small changes can affect timing in many, many different areas, and it generally takes a pretty good knowledge of an entire chip to be able to make modifications without breaking things
Contrast this with (well-designed) software, in which there are generally interfaces and black boxes. In a free software project, I can usually go in and make edits relatively easily; the assumption that changing the internals of a black box without changing an interface won't break anything generally holds true. This is an important point that makes improvement by the masses feasible.
In every verilog or vhdl-based project on which I've worked, a small group of coordinated, very closely communicating engineers was critical to ending up with a good design.
Circuit design has a much steeper learning curve
To create a good VLSI project, you need to have quite a bit of training/experience under your belt. It's relatively easy to start programming and gradually learn what works and what doesn't. As a result, the pool of available programming talent dwarfs the pool of available circuit design talent.
Revisions are expensive
Referring back to ESR's C&B, releasing often is critical to the success of a free software project. Hardware doesn't afford that luxury, especially chip design. You can see the results in simulation, and possibly in some sort of FPGA emulation rapidly, but the end results are on VERY long term cycles. Software allows you to incorporate changes and include them in the end release product in minutes. Chip revisions cost thousands and thousands of dollars for new mask sets, which make frequent revisions pretty much impossibly for even the big corporations, much less the little guy.
Moore's law hurts
There are two major spectrums to address here.
For high end chips (Your Athlons, Coppermines, Alphas, etc.), the design deadline is absolutely critical. The luxury of "Being done when it's done" that is a central tenant of free software development doesn't work in chip design. There's a window of opportunity for a fabrication process that you have to hit, otherwise you'll either miss the process completely, or you'll be slower and more expensive than someone that did hit it. And what makes free software really cool is that it's often higher quality than the closed equivalents.
The other major area of chip design is embedded processor design. Here the argument is very similar, but performance/cost is king. Competing here is even harder, because the demand curve for these kinds of devices is so nearly horizontal that any cost increase really hurts.
Product lifetimes are generally short
This is related to the Moore's law point. Look at the linux kernel. It has been under active development for upwards of 10 years now, and it's just in the last year started to make a significant dent in the marketplace. With a hardware cycle, you typically have to scrap what you have at the moment every few years and start over, just to take advantage of the improving fabrication processes.
Free software is not a panacea for all processes in the world. There are very few, if any, solutions that are universal. On the other hand, I may eat my words later as problems have a way of being solved in unexpected ways. There are no intractable problems in the points I've listed, but there may be better solutions to the overal problem than open source.
Finally, a quick disclaimer. I work for a company that does MIPS-based chip design. So take everything I say with a grain of salt.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's cool that they release this kind of information. Unfortunately, who the heck has the resources to punch out one of these things besides the major chip manufacturers anyway? Maybe if someone was really bored and had a very large bread board (and a lot of spare time and cash on their hands) they could brew one up out of ICs and other solid state components. Probably run hotter than a docker's arm pit and use more energy than you can shake a stick at. Interesting, regardless.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I'm delighted to hear that someone's actually making headway on this sort of thing, but...
That headline sounds dangerously like undermining ARM and MIPS is regarded as a positive acheivement because what they're doing is fundamentally evil. It isn't, and posting that sort of thing on the front page of slashdot only helps alienate business from the open development community. If we're going to succeed, we need their help sometimes.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Is there good free software to go along with the "opencore"?. i.e. Verilog simulators, Xilinx/Altera style digital design software,etc.? These software packages are quite expensive, and without good free software equivalents to go along with the free cpu designs, the whole thing is pretty much pointless for the hobbyist.
OK, we won that whole open software thing. Hardware? Time to start stressing the importance of "free, as in beer" :) heh heh
As a practicing attorney at a leading IP firm, may I be the first to congratulate these kids on what they have achieved? To liberate intellectual property from other people, to destroy the value of their IP and to do it all wholly legally is truly an inspiring achievement.
Could I perhaps, however, blow the trumpet for my own profession and point out that the entire IP edifice which made this possible was the creation of lawyers? It was lawyers who created the statute and precedent which makes a viable IP solution to the issues raised by the GPL and Opencores possible. Without dedicated IP lawyers, Opencores would be mired in a sea of uncertain intellectual property rights. Even though I believe that the firm itself got its advice from some punky West-Coast firm, it is firmly in the grand legal tradition of IP law invented over the last two hundred years, ever since the writing of the US Constitution itself, the first document to introduce the concept of a civil patent.
Lawyers. You don't have to love us, but we gave you IP in all its glory.
John S Montoya, formerly known as streetlawyer.
PS: I used to curse a lot on this site, but my firm now has a firewall on all email messages. Any of you young geniuses know how to get round it?
People like you are going to keep the open source movement from advancing.
Don't be so paranoid. There's a reason why open source became adopted by many people.
Take a trip back to 1997. Windows was so buggy and it wasn't just me. Everyone else was losing data and lost time. Remember when NT was released? NT 3.5? If that wasn't enough, remember NT 4.0? At work too. Viruses were rampant. I was afraid to look at someone else's computer for fear it would break out and catch something. My computer was in isolation and its inbred closed operating system still crashed. It was the shits.
Only because many of the show stopping bugs have been found in Windows that many people are able to find it completely tolerable. I won't return to Windows, because now I see its a closed source trap.
Open source has gotten a lot of attention lately not because it is economically free, but because companies/people are profitting off of it.
People are making a profit off it? Great; however, I make my money doing something else, but when computers crash, it makes my job harder. That's why I enjoy the stability and open nature of free software.
Open hardware design is great for people like me who often find a need to work with existing machines and adapt them to the changing needs we have. Open things open up opportunities. If they close them, find another line of work.
If you want a Free implementation of an ARM-compatible CPU, just turn to anyone in the CMU ECE dept. who has taken 18-347 (the 2nd level processor-design course). The semester-long project in that course is to implement an ARM-compatible CPU in Verilog. Structural in the fall, procedural in the spring :)
They don't synthesize them (no real point), but they run them in simulation, and you can write assembly or use the GNU ARM compiler to make code for it. I believe (haven't taken the course yet) they give you a few of the more complex parts to save time (I think they give you the FPU). You write the rest in your project groups.
Just have to talk someone in the class into releasing their code under a Free license. Have to check about any restrictions on any code they were given to use, tho
It's very easy to fab chips these days. Lots of companies are out there doing custom chips for various applications (ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits). All of those companies have a premium on fast design, and getting the hardware right on the first fab run (since that's a very expensive and time consuming step). And all of these companies use outside fabs to actually make the chips.
.18 micron copper process (unless you wann pay IBM to fab for you, and I bet they're steep). But lots of guys have pretty good .25u stuff. Band together with some friends and get an order going!
:)
So you can take these OpenRISC designs over to your favorite fab company, and just have a bunch made. Motorola does this (for pretty big orders). There are quite a few others. It's not even that expensive; professors here at CMU get their experimental designs fabbed (in small quantities) when they're ready.
But what's even cooler is to get a nice Xilinx or Altera FPGA, and just download the chip on there. That's how the designers work. It's not the most price effective (a good enough FPGA board will cost you a couple k, and you need the synthesis software, and a good copy of Verilog or VHDL) but it's way more fun, since you can play with the chip yourself and change it around. We did this (with a pretty simple chip design) in my 18-240 class.
What's more important is that there's plenty of competition for fabbing chips, so the market is good for consumers (rather unlike the traditional chip market). So you're likely to get a considerably better deal. You can't get the absolute latest
[sigh] too bad the OpenRISC is all VHDL and I only know Verilog, or I'd take it over to the lab here and see if I could get it on the university's FPGAs
But this could end up really changing the way hardware is made and sold. Remember, there are a lot of university ECE departments cranking out good work, and looking for research projects to work on (check out the OpenRISC 2000 on the OpenCores website). The origin of all of UNIX, and more recently of Linux, was people at university CS depts. looking for fun stuff to hack on... all it takes is projects in CVS for the collaboration to begin...
I read this article yesterday and was pleased to see a downloadable 6502 in VHDL and DES encoder on another linked site from the article (http://www.free-ip.com/).
The site that got the most discussion in the article about the RISC core seemed to me to be mostly vapour. Click those links on the left of the site (eagerly reproduced in an earlier post) and you'll see most of them are in the pre-discussion phase, let alone coding.
Bruce Perens or somesuch said it best a few months ago, put out your code first before the vapour.
-Andy
Ever since I started using free software (5 years ago?), I've seen people on the net starting apparently impossible projects. You say to yourself, naah, they'll never make it. FYI: I thought that when I heard about The Gimp for the first time. Imagine my surprise when I installed the RPM 2 years later. I thought that when I heard about WorldForge last year on slashdot. I thought that about opencores -- they have a working chip now. I thought that about Freedows -- hey, they failed.
Overall, you've gotta respect people with grandiose ideas. They are the ones who achieve the greatest things. Or may not. One thing is sure, if you're not slightly megalomaniac, you can't do it, or even understand it.
First Phase; to design and to manufacture a prototype of a computer system in a form of a PCI card that will run GNU/Linux:
/much/ more then JUST Processor cores...check out this list of stuff:
:)
we define a design and verification methodologies
we design a library of small reusable components such as adders, multipliers etc
we design a basic set of IP cores (microprocessor, PCI and SDRAM controller and communication controllers)
we design and manufacture a prototype board with several hundred thousand gates FPGAs
we support our microprocessor architecture with a port of GNU C Compiler, GNU Binutils, GNU Debugger and
architectural/implementation simulator
we support our microprocessor architecture with a port of Linux kernel
This is a project that should have been started a looooooong time ago. Of course the monetary barrier of entry was quite high, but that's all changed....next we'll have LinBoard with the LinProcessor....ooooooh, and all open sourced...
also i just wanted to point out that this is
Comm Controllers
ATM AALx
Eth MAC 10Mbps
FireWire
IP Engine
Serial UART
USB Controller
DSP Cores
FIR Filter
MAC unit
Microprocessors
OpenRISC 1000
OpenRISC 2000
System Controllers
ATA-3 (EIDE)
PCI 32 Bridge
PCI 64 Bridge
SDRAM Controller
Video Controllers
CRT (VGA)
LCD
Prototype Boards
Micro FPGA board
Super FPGA board
now granted some of that is "wanted", but some of it is there....this IS cool tech
Compare this to software, where the bandwidth cost of transmitting a new linux kernel tarball or the presseing cost of a distro CD is pennies or less, and that's a very significant difference. The lack of a significant replication cost is a key reason free software works; there's no real monetary risk involved in distributing CD's.
Contrast this with (well-designed) software, in which there are generally interfaces and black boxes. In a free software project, I can usually go in and make edits relatively easily; the assumption that changing the internals of a black box without changing an interface won't break anything generally holds true. This is an important point that makes improvement by the masses feasible.
In every verilog or vhdl-based project on which I've worked, a small group of coordinated, very closely communicating engineers was critical to ending up with a good design.
Referring back to ESR's C&B, releasing often is critical to the success of a free software project. Hardware doesn't afford that luxury, especially chip design. You can see the results in simulation, and possibly in some sort of FPGA emulation rapidly, but the end results are on VERY long term cycles. Software allows you to incorporate changes and include them in the end release product in minutes. Chip revisions cost thousands and thousands of dollars for new mask sets, which make frequent revisions pretty much impossibly for even the big corporations, much less the little guy.
For high end chips (Your Athlons, Coppermines, Alphas, etc.), the design deadline is absolutely critical. The luxury of "Being done when it's done" that is a central tenant of free software development doesn't work in chip design. There's a window of opportunity for a fabrication process that you have to hit, otherwise you'll either miss the process completely, or you'll be slower and more expensive than someone that did hit it. And what makes free software really cool is that it's often higher quality than the closed equivalents.
The other major area of chip design is embedded processor design. Here the argument is very similar, but performance/cost is king. Competing here is even harder, because the demand curve for these kinds of devices is so nearly horizontal that any cost increase really hurts.
Free software is not a panacea for all processes in the world. There are very few, if any, solutions that are universal. On the other hand, I may eat my words later as problems have a way of being solved in unexpected ways. There are no intractable problems in the points I've listed, but there may be better solutions to the overal problem than open source.
Finally, a quick disclaimer. I work for a company that does MIPS-based chip design. So take everything I say with a grain of salt. :)