Comment by chubs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubs | Hacker News Reader

I'm concerned that the many RISC-V projects seem to be stalling, I'd love to be convinced otherwise?

* It's been almost 2 years since SiFive released their arduino-ish dev board and it hasn't been updated, surely there are huge gains in 2 years in such a fledgling ecosystem? I feel this is important because this board seems the obvious entry point into the RISC-V ecosystem for enthusiasts.

* The 'BOOM' processor which showed many efficiency gains doesn't seem to be getting anywhere further than last time i checked on it which was perhaps a year or more ago. -edit- looking on their github releases, 2.1 was 6mo ago, and 2.1.1 was recent but shows minor changes, the project unfortunately looks stalled to me.

* LowRISC which has one or two of the RaspberryPi co-founders on board, which seems to be a good sign as far as 'getting something out the door' - i can't seem to see any output from their project?

Please prove me wrong, i'd like to get involved somehow but i have to be careful where I invest my time :)

There has been a decent amount of projects recently. Andes Announced 1.2 GHz CPUs made on 28nm die, and a Chinese company are taking orders for a 400MHz dual-core AI chip. SiFive at the start of the year did start selling HiFive Unleashed, but it is very expensive.

The Berkeley processor is mostly a research CPU for FPGAs. I would however love to see it on actual silicon.

At a guess i'd say it will be a few years until we see RISC-V popping up in more places.

"I would however love to see it on actual silicon."

Qty 1, but... https://mobile.twitter.com/boom_cpu/status/10324470709283962...

No kidding, that's impressive! That was a couple months ago now, i wonder if they've got it connected to a board/RAM and working ?

This is a pretty reductive analysis compared to the massive amounts of activity in RISC-V

- SiFive is a costume silicon company, and they have development platforms for the nodes their working with. It makes little sense for them to push this far beyond in terms of dev boards. Overall SiFive is doing much for Software and RISC-V Standard.

- BOOM was never a large open source project, but rather the work of a single grad student and he is a student no more. However there are certain changes coming from Esperanto and there was also more tapeouts. See Hot Chips 30 talk BROOM.

* The LowRisc effort has been slow. One of the main people who worked on it is working on the LLVM compiler and the LowRisc project gets some amount of money for that work.

There are way to many project to list here and there I don't know what you are interested in doing.

Thanks for the response! I didn't realise BOOM was just one person. And i did notice that LowRisc has a lot of LLVM-related commits. Perhaps i've got the wrong end of the stick here. Maybe RISC-V is more 'subterranean' than is obvious, due to its embedded aims. Have a good one, thanks for the explanation :)

I can give some insight on BOOM - Chris Celio, the grad student who built BOOM, recently graduated, but there are some new students now who are picking up on the effort. Expect to see more work on BOOM in the coming year.

More recently, we've integrated it into our FPGA simulation flow, FireSim: https://github.com/firesim/firesim

You can see BOOM doing some "real stuff" here and spin up your own (on an FPGA on EC2 F1): https://fires.im/2018/08/19/firesim-1.3.1-with-BOOM-support....

Agreed WRT all those projects. SiFive seems to be encouraging independent proprietary developments instead of taking funding for a single awesome one. If all the money spent on closed projects was pooled, they'd be willing it by now.

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