Hacker News Reader

Comment by autoliteInline | Hacker News Reader

I figure someone might as well go whole-hog on that and build a PC with just a big ol' FPGA.

FPGAs are incredibly closed, outside of Lattice Semiconductor's tiny FPGAs (unsuitable for computers). In all practicality for "openness", any open-source advocate should rather use Intel/AMD than Xilinx/Altera.

Closed-source synthesizers, closed source bootup, closed source loaders, etc. etc. You're pretty much trusting the FPGA software more than any CPU.

> In all practicality for "openness", any open-source advocate should rather use Intel/AMD than Xilinx/Altera.

That's an ironic comparison to make -- Intel bought Altera in 2015, and AMD is in the process of acquiring Xilinx.

Between the two, though, there's been a lot more work done on open toolchains for Xilinx FPGAs.

oh, bummer. So you'd need a clean tool chain too.

Fpgas are very unsuitable general purpose computers. De10 nano is a very beefy fpga and can barely play doom acting like a general purpose 486 and lacks a fpga

Oh well, I figured that a PowerPC Notebook was for hobbyists.

What I would find fascinating is to think about languages and OSs for FPGA and try to break loose from the utterly boring C/Unix/68k,x86,MIPS,blah paradigm. Having something turnkey with attachment to various ports and a display would be kind of cool. Maybe that exists already.

I worked on a project with a processor-on-an-FPGA and while it wasn't fast, the video codec in FPGA made it useful. Kind of a neat thing I think.

Ppc notebook is a thing because ppc has been “open sourced” so you can just make ppc chips using great documentation with nobody knocking on your door. As a technology it’s dead as a door nail but it’s free as speech.

That is being done too for when trust REALLY matters.

See the Precursor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com