IRC logs for #openrisc Friday, 2016-07-22

--- Log opened Fri Jul 22 00:00:50 2016
olofkssvb: Haha. Yeah, it looks so. That's good. It was a nice board but ORSoC stopped producing them even though there was a demand, so it's great that people can get boards09:57
olofkEven though it's starting to get a bit outdated by now09:57
olofkOh, and it was pretty expensive I see now09:58
ZipCPUI wonder if they have figured the market is a small, but dedicated, group of die-hards willing to pay any price ... and therefore the high price was the only way to recoup their development cost.10:38
mafmwhat would be needed to produce a orsoc, even if it's not very performant / power efficient / etc?10:41
mafmI was wondering of something like these CPU-cards would be feasible -- https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop10:41
mafmblueCmd should still have the .deb packages around, with ~6k software packages10:43
blueCmdIdo10:48
blueCmdi do*10:48
-!- Netsplit *.net <-> *.split quits: stekern, mripard, blueCmd11:39
-!- Netsplit over, joins: mripard, blueCmd11:47
-!- Netsplit over, joins: stekern11:47
olofkmafm: We have OpenRISC SoCs for many dev boards. For this you would probably want the cheapest one with 32MB RAM and ethernet (or maybe SD), to store the packages. You could probably find a dev board for ~$70 with those constraints12:51
mafmolofk: you mean dev boards as in FPGA?  I thought that those were too slow for using as real systems?13:09
mafmlike running at 50Mhz or so13:09
ZipCPUSee ... that's why you need a ZipCPU ... it'll run on a $70 FPGA board using an 80MHz clock ...  ;>13:56
olofkmafm: Yes, you might be able to get it a bit faster, say 200MHz on a more expensive FPGA, but to get more than that you would need to build an ASIC. Unfortunately there aren't any usable OpenRISC or RISC-V ASICs available yet. I just thought you asked what was possible to do right now17:05
olofkSo it all depends on what you want to do17:05
olofkmafm: If I understood correctly, Kurt at MIT was planning to build some kind of setup for you based on FPGA boards. Did I understand him correctly?17:08
mafmhe planned to, but I was thinking in terms of people to use devices based on openrisc, without fiddling too much and reasonably fast17:15
mafmlike... 500Mhz or something17:15
mafmI have the feeling that systems on FPGAs, even if the FPGAs are cheap, are not very usable as end systems17:16
mafmlike very small amounts of memory for today's systems, very slow, etc; or if not slow/ram-limited, very very *very* expensive17:17
mafmI think that the EOMA68 guy can get minimum orders of ~250 units and sell them under 100$17:18
mafm(not the fastest arm, but well... with 1GB of ram or more, etc -- a decent system)17:18
mafmso I was thinking that, for hard-core fans of openrisc and risc-v and so on, people would be very happy to get a system with those prices, and orders of 250 are not that many -- it's the number of attendees of the risc-v workshop, for example17:20
kc5tjaI thought we had less than that for workshop #3.  Any attendance figures for #4?  I heard it sold out.17:20
mafmkc5tja: ~250, but probably some no-shows17:21
mafm(I heard the number, but don't know for real)17:21
mafmolofk: above ^17:21
mafmalso, Kurt was planning to use ZedBoards I think, they seem to have 512MB of RAM so it's a least reasonable, but probably not good to compile C++ code (or using swap a lot)17:22
mafmfor compiling, actually something like Qemu is much more convenient/flexible, as we did with openrisc17:24
mafmas long as it implements the ABI/specs correctly, which I am not sure if riscv-qemu currently does17:25
mafm(last commits in April, well before the latest userland spec changes)17:25
olofkkc5tja, mafm : Yes. 250 tickets, but I guess at least 50 people didn't show up judging from the stack of badges remaining17:55
kc5tjaNice.  Maybe #5 will be larger still.17:56
olofkmafm: Yeah. Then we would have to wait for real silicon. The cost of doing an ASIC varies a lot, but $1M isn't an unreasonable startup cost17:57
shornehello, been away on 3 weeks vacation18:05
olofkshorne: Welcome back. Hope you had a good time18:10
mafmolofk: so I was wondering, why this guy needs only 250 orders?  is it because all of the process is already done by other company, you only buy the license to build a few units?18:30
--- Log closed Sat Jul 23 00:00:51 2016

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