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Comment by fischert | Hacker News Reader

This is not at all what a softcore is to me. This simply means that it is not a cpu which takes physical space on the FPGA whether you use it or not, it would only takes some celle of the logical array if inferred.

But it is rather redundant to say vhdl and softcore, plus there are no riscv hardcore yet on FPGA.

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> But it is rather redundant to say vhdl and softcore

I disagree. Firstly, there are many other hardware description languages (Verilog, migen, SpinalHDL for instance), and while they can more or less interoperate, one could prefer a given language depending on the context.

Secondly, vhdl can be synthesized, placed and routed as an ASIC "hard core" or more precisely "soft macro".

Yeah, you are right, I don't know of any FPGA (yet) shipping with hard RISC-V cores.

Microsemi have the PolarFireSOC which has 4x RISC-V hard cores in the FPGA. I have an eval board on my desk

Five. Four full-featured 64 bit cores with MMU, FPU, LInux capable-etc. Plus one 64 bit no MMU no FPU core for ... real time / microcontroller / whatever dedicated tasks.

Lattice have some FPGA's with RISC-V cores in them IIRC

I thought so, too. I have read about the Lattice MACH-NX having a secure enclave based on a RISC-V CPU, but it seems like this is just a soft-core CPU as well.

https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/soc-fpgas/5498-p...

Microsemi not lattice, my apologies

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