BracketMaster

Simulator is written internally in Nim. There isn't really a good FOSS IR for RTL sims on the market currently. I absolutely refuse to use MLIR or anything based on LLVM for that matter. LLVM takes up to 40 minutes to rebuild on my Apple silicon. This is completely unacceptable in terms of rapid iteration.

Yosys is a very capable FOSS synthesizer and Verilator is a FOSS simulator actually used in production at ARM.

Not yet - but keep an eye out here: https://github.com/chipeleven

Happy to have a chat. How may I reach you?

One thing people don't often bring up is how great nim is for writing DSLs.

DSLs really matter in the hardware and digital design space - a space that seems to be completely devoid of innovation when it comes to tooling.

A couple languages that try to bring RTL into the 21st century are nMigen-Python and Chisel-Scala.

I'm currently writing an RTL in Nim.

Nim's macro system allows you to do really cool things like instantiate named RTL wires and create custom operators like `:=` for Signal assignment. Really excited about tier 1 BigNum support coming soon - which will make it easier to simulate arbitrary width integer signal arithmetic.

Again - we're not going for 3070GTX performance levels here. We plan to disrupt industry by being the first production grade open source GPU implementation ever.

So the initial corporate customers we talked to just want something that plays 1080p videos and is passable at 3D graphics. Currently, the GPGPU hits at around 25GFLOPS peak performance on an ARIA FPGA. We're targeting GF12nm - some back of the envelope calculation put us at 125GFLOPS for actual silicon implementations.

We need somebody with GPU driver expertise as well as GPU architecture expertise. The guy we were considering going with for this summer wants to just wrap up his dissertation instead and graduate - which is totally understandable.

The GPU was largely a one man effort by him. He is very talented.

Here's our website if it helps: https://chipeleven.com

Feel free to ask me any questions about what on earth we're actually doing.

Its definitely not investor driven at all. We had a long long internal hashing out of RISC-V vs. POWER internally - and POWER won by a long shot when it came to sheer demand from potential customers interested in something other than embedded hard drive controller CPUs.

For example, POWER right now support off the shelf AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. POWER also has full JSv8 web browser and JDK engine support.

And I also don't build companies for investors. EVER.

I've chosen investors that believe in the vision and I am not afraid to be vocal.

Well first impression, I just navigated to the page in Safari on my MBP 2015 i7 2.2GHz and scrolling was incredibly slow...

This could be a Safari thing, as things are pretty smooth in edge for Mac.

Apple really messed up with the keyboard. I've heavily considered going completely Linux - I just can't give up the MBP touchpad or battery life. Second to none...

So I've been programming since I was 7 and used dual boot until I was 15. At 15, I switched to WSL when it came out, and then when I was 19 I bought a Mac.

Mac hands down is just better for programming. Especially with its fantastic touchpad support in my mind. WSL has some file system quirkiness that comes up every once in a while.

Other than that, it's passable. The Mac Finder file browser is super advanced and I use its column mode regularly. On top of that, dragging the current finder folder to terminal changes me into that folder in terminal. Mac is full of tricks like that which can be mapped to keyboard shortcuts. At the end of the day, being the power user that I am, these things matter.

I mainly do RTL, kernel, and some webdev if that matters.

Super fascinating!! Verification is SUPER important I think. I actually wrote an FOSS end-to-end TensorFlow CNN accelerator that can be synthesized for FPGAs using completely FOSS tools.

I'm working on adding formal verification to it. I used FOSS tools such as Yosys and NextPNR, made possible by FOSS hackers who reverse engineered different FPGAs.

I hope to release the full codebase at the end of this summer. https://bracketmaster.github.io/MAERI-RTL/

I also started a company working on a completely FOSS CPU+GPU using similar approaches. https://systemeslibres.org

Everything is fine for me fortunately. The football hall of fame was really hit hard, and the CNN center took some damage from burns.

I really don't understand. ATL is the home of MLK(his house is open to walk-in). There is a sizable appreciation for the black community in Atlanta.

I am aware that part of the black community in Atlanta, especially black business owners don't identify with CNN. But clearly, it wasn't black business owners burning down CNN.

There is another side to the equation. Stone Mountain is also next to Atlanta. Stone Mountain is where the Ku-Klux-Klan(the organization at the heart of racism in the south) was reborn in 1915.

Fortunately, I work in software, so not much has impacted my job security :). In fact, I usually spent most of my day in front of a computer writing software, so not much has changed.

LOL. I kinda hope so.

Well, my friend has a Pinebook Pro. He's capable of writing drivers himself and designing MOBOs for CPUs. He's actually designed a CPU and written a compiler for it.

Being able to get to the core of the system matters very much to him - being able to trust his hardware. Releasing MOBO files strengthens that trust. In addition, he can repair the MOBO himself if need be.

I suppose me and my friend represent a minority of users though.

This is an ARM laptop. Since it isn't intel, that means you can have access to the MOBO schematics as well as the processor data sheet.

This means that the average person can design a computer around the processor without paying a couple million to intel in NDA agreements.

This is a being deal for the FOSS hardware community - I myself am actually working on a project to make an open processor with a GPU. https://systemeslibres.org

I'm actually near Atlanta where some of the looting is. I'm mixed and partly AA, can't say I particularly approve of the violence given how dangerous and destructive it is.

Of course, what originally happened in Minneapolis is not excusable either.

Ah, quite possible - I had not noticed this.

Yeah strange - couldn't find any dates...

Ooh - definitely should go through with that. Also, I'm doing a pilot show interviewing some Tech moguls local to Atlanta. There's a diverse group I'm interviewing from wealthy entrepreneurs to notable employees of bell labs, to people who hold an insane amount of patents. I think you could definitely fit in there somewhere.

Keep on, however, and soon I'm sure you will be the longest serving.

Where do you work now? And also, I've heard that at Google for example, there is prejudice against older programmers? Have you experienced anything like that?

This is pretty cool. Definitely worth documenting I think.

Saw that a year back. Thanks ATT for preserving this.

I feel like this has been tried before. The first GPU@5GFLOPs isn't very good performance, but its a move in the right direction for FOSS hardware.

This truly is amazing.

I've noticed that GPU does help a lot with inference. It would be nice if it were easier to make projects like these mobile.

Google and Apple have SDKs for running nets on phones, but its a shame its so hard to do things like this on the Raspberry pi...

Interesting read and makes sense. Defining an unambiguous language is hard.

The full C grammar isn't very long, however, handling cases such as undefined behaviors between types seems to cause trouble.

Once upon a time, C was the new language in town...