|
Message
From: Joachim Strömbergson<Joachim.Strombergson@I...>
Date: Mon Mar 27 08:55:48 CEST 2006
Subject: [oc] Other Open cores
Aloha!> On 3/23/06, Lauro, John <jlauro@u...> wrote:
> Highly unlikely to work. Mainly it's a question of scale: the processor
> is designed to run in a full-custom process, using a mid-range die in a
> recent process. That puts it well beyond the capabilities of any single
> FPGA.
But the Niagara T1 contains eight cores, each of which is a single-scalar
in-issue but multithreaded core. You should be able to run a one or a few
of those cores in an FPGA.
The Niagara architectures is actually designed to be scaleable in many
different ways. Number of cores, number of threads/core, number of
cores/shared resource (caches, external mem-interface, accelerator
co-processors etc). Sun is naturally looking at scaling UP, but my guess
is that you also should be able to scale DOWN.
The Niagara is actually quite interesting for embedded solutions. Less
reliance on caches for example should provide better support for
deterministic real-time performance.
I haven't looked at the code yet though. Hopefully it is less
custom-design -ish than the PicoJava code which basically was a hand
written netlist. I guess that we at Ericsson i Gothenburg were one of the
very few outside Sun that actually did some serious attempts at running
that code through a complete tool suite. The Pico in PicoJava was clearly
not a reference to the size of the CPU.
--
Med vänlig hälsning
Joachim Strömbergson
-----------------------------------------------
|
 |
Browse
