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On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 11:26 AM, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo manuel.montezelo@gmail.com wrote:
2016-07-18 01:38 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
MIPS it's a more realistic possibility, but I am not sure if IC1T is a very good option, if it has no foothold in the market yet, has zero distributions supporting it, and it doesn't offer clear advantages in other areas (??). I wouldn't mind at all to get one of those, but I am not sure if many people will follow... so would be bad in terms of effectiveness.
if it can't have debian... yeah. as in, because the open64.net compiler "isn't called gcc", it's almost impossible to *do* a debian port.
As you probably know, but others perhaps not, it's not just a matter of the compiler, but also to port many many software packages and submitting patches upstream and take care of this for years.
For ARM, MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC and the rest of non-Intel-but-well-known it's maybe not 100% perfect, but there are Debian (or other distros/OSs) ports working almost as well as the best ones. But I suppose that for IC1T it's not the case at all, so it would need a lot of effort also in the software front, for years.
yeahyeah.... it's too much.
... but if you *don't do* that licensing, and instead try to replicate them all, you are immediately placing the entire project at risk. bear in mind that TSMC won't talk to you if you make a failed chip (first time) because you're wasting their time. and it costs $USD 2 *MILLION* for the production masks (the lithographic masks like an OHP plastic sheet)
I don't really have any idea about the fabrication processes, but according to this:
https://dev.sifive.com/documentation/freedom-u500-platform-guide/
"The resulting customized U500 SoC is optimized for manufacture in a TSMC 28nm metal-gate process, and delivered as packaged tested parts by SiFive."
and contains most of the technologies that you mention, except video, but maybe the custom accelerators can substitute traditional GPUs.
yeah the "except video" means it can't be used (as a SoC). connecting a GPU via PCIe.... mmm... you're at what... between 20 to 1000 watts there, depending on the GPU?
and up to *FOUR* DDR3/4 lanes? WOW. 128-bit-wide memory access. yowser. that's going to be something like 12-20 watts just on memory access.
Yeah, I agree. I was only saying that if one's going to go out of her/his way and consider IC1T for a future option, RISC-V can be a more interesting and future-proof alternative *than IC1T* (not better than ARM or MIPS at the moment).
... we still have to have the OS support. so we still need to wait for debian, arch and fedora to catch up.
Also, that I'd consider to do this only a few years down the line, not now -- and focusing only in the A20 at the moment.
... and other low-power SoCs.
Yeah, Loongson would be also good, although I am not sure if they will keep it active or if they'll abandon it in favour of others.
well it's the one that the chinese government is pushing for their independent supercomputer - intel lost out there thanks to the NSA, congratulations U.S. Government you just f*****d your own economy well done!
l.