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

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 2:06 AM, zap <calmstorm at posteo.de> wrote:

> According to the lowrisc website though, you can make a 64 bit processor
> if you so choose though.

 yes.  the minioncores would be on the same bus, not requiring any
kind of cache coherency with either each other or with the main 64-bit
CPU(s), either doing DMA writes (on their own) or responding to bus
memory reads/writes in order appear as memory-addressable peripherals.

> I am sure you know this, but I just hope you understand that better
> possibilities exist. ;)

 you may be misunderstanding that the purpose of 32-bit minion cores
is *in addition* to there being one or more main processor(s) which
are SMP or NUMA, which themselves have a bus width (32, 64, 128 bit)
that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the minion-cores
being 32-bit.

> I Wonder when they are going to crowdfund though...

 i get the general impression that they're quite happy to focus on
development as opposed to raising funds to create an actual processor.
each task requires different skills, time and effort.  if the team
focussed on crowdfunding that would be a serious distraction from
their development efforts.

 this therefore is an opportunity to create a crowd-funded processor
which utilises their expertise.  the one main thing which i could
really do with is a DDR or other high-speed memory interface that is
proven... and compatible with the GPL.

l.