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Help Build the World's First Community-Funded CPU ASIC

Posted by timothy on from the dude-hook-us-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The 32-bit OpenRISC CPU has been available for many FPGAs and was turned into a commercial ASIC in 2003. Now, the OpenCores community is asking for donations to create a new ASIC with the OpenRISC CPU, ethernet, PCI, UART, USB and other peripherals. The goal is to be able to sell these ASICs at a low price to anyone who wants to build a cheap embedded system built completely on open source. The OpenRISC currently runs on Linux 2.6.37 and has ports of gcc 4.5.1 among other things."

1 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Fix? by poptones · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Too bad that, because it's an ASIC, all you can do is LOOK at that source code then try to design your code around the problem.

    I'm down with open source, but this seems fantastically stupid to me. I can buy a pretty powerful CPU from a host of manufacturers at some very good prices - less than the $25 donation they request on their page, in fact.

    We want to provide an alternative to the profit-hunting semiconductor giants who only provide "cost efficient prices" to large multi-national companies...

    This is bullshit. This is about an agenda, not about the economic reality of "competing."