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Project Aims To Build a Fully Open SoC and Dev Board
DeviceGuru (1136715) writes "A non-profit company is developing an open source 64-bit system-on-chip that will enable fully open hardware, 'from the CPU core to the development board.' The 'lowRISC' SoC is the brainchild of a team of hardware and software hackers from the University of Cambridge, with the stated goal of implementing a 'fully open computing eco-system, including the instruction set architecture (ISA), processor silicon, and development boards.' The lowRISC's design is based on a new 64-bit RISC-V ISA, developed at UC Berkeley. The RISC-V core design has now advanced enough for the lowRISC project to begin designing an SoC around it. Prototype silicon of a 'RISC-V Rocket' core itself has already been benchmarked at UC Berkeley, with results results (on GitHub) suggesting that in comparison to a 32-bit ARM Cortex-A5 core, the RISC-V core is faster, smaller, and uses less power. And on top of that it's open source. Oh, and there's a nifty JavaScript-based RISC-V simulator that runs in your browser."
Ah, you youngins...its original meaning was anyone who whacked away at software or hardware, it had nothing to do with finding unintended uses or any other borderline technical behavior. What happened was Hollywood and the media picked up the term to apply to people for whom they had no name. Those people were originally called crackers. But Hollywood and the media couldn't tell the phonetic different between the two terms, hacker was easier to pronounce, and had few letters. Then some babies were born and now use the term in its present meaning.