[Arm-netbook] mali gpu reverse engineering lkcl may ignore

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2017 at 11:02 PM, zap <calmstorm at posteo.de> wrote:

> Tell me what you think of lowrisc when you get a chance. I mean as a
> base for your processors. heh.

 i feel that the lowrisc team fit better with the ethics of what i
would like to see be achieved (note deliberate use of third person,
i.e. that i am not personally tying a personal egoistic agenda to or
correlation with the desire to see success).

 i noted in particular that the lowrisc team has set up as a CIC.
that's a big plus.

 technically i am particularly impressed with the concept of using a
32-bit RISCV for GPIO, which they call "minion cores".  bitbanging
isn't really bitbanging any more if there's an entire CPU dedicated to
it.  the advantage of their approach is that you no longer require
complex multiplexing hardware on the GPIO (as is normally done, with
dedicated hardware blocks for each I/O function).  you simply... load
a different program into the minioncore and the pins which e.g. were
previously I2C are now UART.  or
some-other-future-as-yet-unspecified-or-unforseen-I/O-interface.
upgrading to the latest version of SDMMC is therefore dead easy: just
write a new program for the minion core.

l.