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How does this compare to chisel?

From a glance: it seems like it is more specific for accelerators. Chisel deals in the general way, but Calyx seems to have primitives for wiring systolic arrays for example. If you plan to do an OoO CPU, choose Chisel. If you want to do a DSP or TPU, choose Calyx.

You can express full CPU designs in Calyx (in fact, we have) because it is a superset of a hardware description language. However, Calyx will probably not provide any substantial benefit in this case because there are not that many opportunities to optimize things.

The premise of Calyx is you're generating hardware designs from high-level code which has a lot more structure than arbitrary HDL code and the compiler will use that extra structure to automatically do optimizations that cannot be done over arbitrary HDL code.

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