[Arm-netbook] The future of EOMA-68

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2015-05-02 17:00 Paul Boddie:
>On Saturday 2. May 2015 17.07.57 Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
>>
>> Speaking of openness/FSF-endorsability, and having into account that the
>> current focus is to go ahead with what is already planned like the A20,
>> with which I fully agree (so please don't take this as a demand, just as
>> showing interest) -- would it be feasible in the near future to have
>> OpenRISC or RISC-V (or RISC-V-based lowrisc, when ready)?
>
>I imagine that it depends on things like availability of hardware versions of
>CPUs for these architectures. I recall that there was a board for OpenRISC
>that used an FPGA, and there was also a fundraising campaign for an ASIC
>version of, I think, the OR1200 which didn't succeed. So it may be the case
>that an FPGA solution is the only remotely near-future option, and that brings
>a lot of other issues.

Basically, the underlying question of what I was wondering (because I don't have
any idea about hardware manufacturing), is if instead of asking companies to
manufacture EOMA-68 A20 CPU cards, they could be asked to manufacture the same
but with OpenRISC or RISC-V cores instead.


>There's also the distinction between plain CPUs and SoCs. I don't really
>follow what goes on around these things, but I recall that the people who were
>developing the Milkymist One hardware were aiming to deliver an SoC solution
>based on the LatticeMico32 core:
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Labs
>
>I don't know what the situation is with OpenRISC and SoCs.

I also don't know much about this, but there are efforts in that direction (both
in OpenRISC and RISC-V camps), for example:

  http://opencores.org/or1k/ORPSoC

lowrisc themselves want to go ahead with a SoC based on RISC-V, with additional
CPU features.


Cheers.
--
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>