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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.

6 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. An open cpu? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm pretty sure CPUs are supposed to be closed so as to keep dust out.

  2. 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/).

    1. Re:What's special here?? by egladil · · Score: 4, Informative

      What is special is that they are making an open toolchain to program an FPGA and that toolchain is now capable enough to program a working CPU into the FPGA.

      If you had read the entire summary you would have seen that the CPU design they were using was the J1 that you mention.

  3. Re:Most people won't care by xophos · · Score: 4, Informative

    Forget the future, they are here and they are advertised as features:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  4. Re:Most people won't care by Balthisar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's kind of the same issue with open source software, as far as the "most people don't care" aspect, but at an even greater disadvantage that open source software. I don't have a chip fab (at least I could compile open source software), and so even if I were capable of understanding the chip design, there's not much of a guarantee that the physical chip I purchase doesn't have some proprietary back door built into it.

    Like most people, I'm even lazy about the open source software I use. While I try to download from trusted sources, there's no guarantee that what I actually install matches the current stable version in the repo. I'm taking a leap of faith.

    In both cases (including the former where I indicated my ignorare about chip design), presumably I am counting on other experts to understand the chip or understand the source code for me, but only in the latter case could I actually assemble the product myself in order to guarantee matching the reviewed, stable code.

    --
    --Jim (me)
  5. Re:Most people won't care by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Funny

    They don't understand that Intel/AMD CPUs could or will have backdoors. If not now, then very soon in the future.

    I usually decap my CPUs and inspect them before installing them. I haven't seen anything suspicious so far.

    The real problem is Windows. Having to disassemble/inspect the OS before installing wasn't too bad, it's the constant stream of patches that gets me down.

    --
    No sig today...