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Project IceStorm Passes Another Milestone: Building a CPU

Posted by samzenpus on from the building-it-better dept.

beckman101 writes: FPGAs — specialized, high speed chips with large arrays of configurable logic — are usually highly proprietary. Anyone who has used one is familiar with the buggy and node-locked accompanying tools that FPGA manufacturers provide. Project IceStorm aims to change that by reverse-engineering some Lattice FPGAs to produce an open-source toolchain, and today it passed a milestone. The J1 open-source CPU is building under IceStorm, and running on real hardware. The result is a fairly puny microcontroller, but possibly the world's most open one.

3 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. What's special here?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are plenty of fully open source CPUs around.

    There is a community building CPUs from discrete logic (http://mycpu.selfhost.it/), from transistors (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/128035-how-to-build-an-8-bit-computer-from-scratch) and even from relays (http://www.nablaman.com/relay/).

    There are also Forth CPUs which are freely embeddable into a FPGA (the J1: http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html) and which can be purchased now (http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/).

  2. Re:Most people won't care by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    At some point you have to trust someone, be it the distributor from whom you're getting the os, the manufacturer or reseller supplying the hardware or even the supplier of the compiler...

    The only thing you can practically do, is ensure everything you use is available from multiple opposing sources... Something that's in use by both the us and russian governments is unlikely to be backdoored as both organisations have sufficient resources to perform the due diligence checks.

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  3. Re:Most people won't care by tigersha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    An Intel i7 Quadcore has 1.7 Billions transistors on board. A Haswell E 18 Core monster chip 5.5 billion. Even a simple ARM Cortex has 26 million transistors.

    Do you think any single person at Intel knows everything about such a chip? Even the experts of the experts? How do do you think you are going to even comprehend such a thing even if it is open source? It really makes no difference, and no open source community is going to design a modern high-performance CPU. Intel invested 10.6 billion in R&D in 2013.

    At some point you are going to have to start trusting someone. Why everything has to be open is beyond me.

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