My youtube feed is just Radeon 7, Radeon 7...... but Level1 delivers with something much more interesting.

Featuring Wendell's Star Trek inspired look

The way things are progressing, 2024 will be the year of the RISC-V GNU Hurd gaming desktop.

RISC-V is super cool, and I’ve been working on it at school quite a bit, but, and I don’t mean to be a Debby downer here, but SiFive doesn’t have any open source CPUs. The only thing open source about their cores is that they’re using the open source RISC-V ISA, but the micro architecture implementations of theirs are all proprietary. I do appreciate them pushing RISC-V and for trying to make it easier to integrate stuff with the platform, but the sales pitch is a little disingenuous

Awesome video! Hopefully we're gonna see more from them in the future, IRL but also on your channel :D

Nice to see tech UKpostsrs who report on more than just gaming stuff

Is it just me, or did anyone else think 'Star Trek TOS Science Officer' when looking at what Wendel is wearing in this?

now MIPs is open source. i hope we get good stuff in computer arch in the coming years

Fascinating technology. I have some embedded audio DSP projects in mind and wasn't sure what architecture I want to work with. I'm convinced risc is the future, and everything being open source with a growing ecosystem, this is definitely the way to go. Thanks for the video.

FPGA should be in mass produced products, but only where it makes sense. SDR, Oscilloscopes etc all have FPGAs since the algorithms can be updated and enjoy the benefits of parallelization. But the nvidia module is just a joke

Curious, why it seems that Quake 2 is a sort of nostalgic general benchmark.. The fan on that thing is adorable.

This is interesting stuff. Would love to hear and see more from you guys on this. :) Maybe a guide that explains how to go about setting up Debian on one of those things? Like what hardware is required, how to configure it, setup, installs and all that jazz.

Thanks for covering this topic. I wanted to buy one myself, but imports in my country are very challenging at the moment. For now I am playing around with risc-v in qemu, but it's not the same. Hope to see more on this in the future!

RISC-V is significantly important.

Oh my, so many topics I'd like to expand on. Almost every thing you mention sounds interesting

You sir, found a new subscriber! Perfectly timed for the current state of affairs.

You're right, Wendell. The potential here is very exciting!

already excited for the FPGA video. I was literally just looking around to get into FPGAs

Fascinating.

Great video as always

Really digging the Trek look.

This is great Wendell!!!

Quality content!

At first, that blue sweater really made me think of you cos-playing a crew of the Enterprise.

well summarised! ... were you thinking to compare the energy efficiency of the architectures? i guess this board with the FPGA doing the heavy logistics and the RISC-V early version setup will use more electricity compared to another setup (RK3399 SoC, RaspberryPi, intel x86 Z370, amd x86 x470, ...), right?

I want to see RISC SOCs get integrated into AMD and Intel packages. You could use it for A.I processing, use it to run the OS, use it for background processes and other things.

the inefficiencies in RISCV come from doing any type of gpu related task since the gpu is emulated in software-It can bog things really far down under some use case scenarios. For basic web browsing it is fine. What I'm working on is a cpu that was only partly based on RISCV but with modified and additional instruction sets and firmware so that I could use physical gpu cores integrated into my SOC that communicate with cpu. It eliminated the inefficiencies of RISCV and provides much higher efficiency and performance. This will be going into my laptop which I designed over the past year.

I want fully open source hardware, software and design to be legislatively mandated for voting systems. I can think of no better way to end criminal control of such systems.

This is awesome because it keeps newer architectures within the grasp of us normal joes.

I've been looking at Risc-V for a while now and it is exciting. Given the companies involved I can see Samsung and Google delivering mobile devices with similar SOC performance to Apples bionic custom ARM chips.

Would happily watch more videos on this chip hint hint. I heard a lot of Debian can already on it,

Haven't seen Wendell this excited since... well, since ever, I wonder if in about a year's time we'll be seeing his last L1T video saying goodbye to concentrate all his efforts in the... Wendellexa

I think the architecture is actually very exciting also, seeing how many security issues have resulted due to complexity of modern x86/amd64 stuff. How about simpler architecture, but just scale the core count to something ridiculous? The tasks that usually require much horsepower like video compression/decompression and rendering should be pretty parallelizable..

Good explanation.

Unfortunately, $999 for the main board and $1999 for the expansion board is... a bit outside my budget :(

That intro though.. good stuff. Please do more voice acting for me ;) P.S I may I use that intro as a sound board voice over Wendell? :)

If you wish to talk about the power of FPGA, would be great if more people knew about the MiSTer project. It is amazing how many retro consoles and arcades they have supported on it already!

Down with x86! Long live RISC!

What if you put some put 7 nm pure silicone between the p-n junctions of transistors to incorporate negative resistance or quantum tunneling to speed up larger nano meter chips by using quantum tunneling transistors in 14 plus sized manufacturing??

where are the links to the samatic and documentation , on how to build a CPU ?

"Year of the RISC-V desktop, I don't think we'll see that any time soon." :)

How about Raptor Computing Systems' Talos II and Blackbird systems? Are you familiar with these? It is another open architecture, but built around the IBM POWER9. I'm not sure which Linux distributions run on it at this point, though I know that Fedora supports it, and did even before the IBM purchase of Red Hat. That platform is workstation-level in terms of performance and therefore easily competes with top offerings from Intel and AMD.

Risc v is interesting

Hello, thank you for this video. I'm out of my league here, but i'm working to learn, steep curve. Curious if you could direct me to how to use RISC-V for a server.

You say at the end of the video that you will do a follow up video with the expansion board. Are you still planning on releasing one?

Hey Wendell some testing on this board please and compare it to ARM cores.

Second video of yours I've watched due to manual search results -Subscribed SiFive = the new ARM? I noticed Arrow has a SiFive dev board earlier today. It looks like I should do some more research. Thanks

Helpful

Also, do you have an affiilate link or anything if I purchase something that would benefit you?

More fragmentation yaaaaay

This is so cool. like so cool

I have a USB over Ethernet unit that uses an FPGA to do both the Ethernet and the USB :D

Does illumos OiOS openindiana work on this architecture for enterprise workstations ?

I subbed because of your blue sweater...

I can't find "the next video" you mentioned at the end. At all. What is it called?

Very interesting

Great now I have a hankering for some world conquest

Beard looks very nice in 1440p.

I wonder if it is possible to pull off a dedicated and streamlined emulator machine this way. I see retropie developers making the most of the open source architecture.

Almost makes me wish I understood my course in digital circuit design in undergrad> Lol all that VHDL and Verilog FPGA programming on top of learning what this stuff was and how it worked made us weak and woozy.

I love it. We need open source architecture!!!!!!!

I would love to develop a whole series of compute units that can be fit into a 3.5 HHD form factor. Then you could have a SOC, CPU, GPU, FPG, SSD, HHD, NNU ect. Then they would communicate to each other via a fiber optic network connection so that when you upgrade you took the old SOC or GPU And place them into a home server that managed them like a super computer you could keep the hardware till it wears out and not add to the land fill that which still works. You can the tap into you server for heavy work loads via encrypted internet link. You will grown your computing power not upgrade it.

The RISC/CISC debate was over 20 years ago.

There is HBM memory to plug in to this? or another direct memory? what happened with memristors ?

RISC-V needs to be widely available in microcontrollers and SOCs before it can knock ARM processors of the top spot. This is a long way to go.

2:26 lol that gforce experience on the right

Can you please press F11 and make background full screen?

28nm is kinda dated, but im sure it has a lot of applications still regardless of the die size. Does SiFive make any that are more modern though?

epic video

what happened to the "next" Micro-Semi board video? I can not find it.

Who do I send the final product to for manufacture?

And there goes my idea. My hope for humanity has been raised.

Intro reminded me of ATHF

Dope sweater tho. looking Sharp wendell

nice vid

I'm such a noob but this is interesting af. What do I need to do to get started with something like sifive?

So, Knut's the art of computer science volumes are going to be very popular ... very soon ...

it is all about "how fast" but not for generic tasks, it's a how fast is one's specific tasks

can i do like programming editing there?

At the end of the day.. what else do you need than Quake 2.

The background song is pretty cool. Anyone know the name of it?

Hi, I'm really like this video.

cool a world class cpiu on fpga that's not so expensive to buy. is there xilinx fpga code to implement the cpu somewhere ?

How many TH/s for Bitcoin mining? What is the energy consumption?

Intro music reminds me of Starcraft music.

Oooooooh shyt! I thought Wendell was wearing a Star Trek TOS shirt, lol.

1:24 Yes, but Raspberry π is ARM, and ARM is RISC, too.

Where is the follow up video ??

Cool!

Hardware that can be reconfigured in case of an update or a design flaw should not be in a finished product - I agree.

i would love to see these things made into simple application modules, "Level1 Loungeroom Modules", u have a fpga as a base, and then attach the risk modules , 1 for spotify, 1 for steam, 1 for alternative wanna be steams like epic, etc... then as soon as anyone tries to fix one or make modification in anyway...... we sue the friggen pants off that puppy and keep truckin! on a more realistic level i would like to see this kind of thing implemented into our loungerooms to give us better control of our "smart homes", something like this would allow the person to have a local network for their smart home rather than a web service which would mean better security and lower latency.

please more risc v content!

I’ll wait for RISC-VI.

The fan is so tiny it's so cute.

watching this while making my own MIPS processor

How do you buy one? Wanna use this and run linux like you can do with a Pi

The issue with ASIC development isn't the cost to develop, its the cost to put into production. An ASIC is fully custom silicon and you have have a contract with a manufacturer or be a manufacturer to have an ASIC produced. The actual design of an ASIC starts at the same place that the program for an FPGA that configures it, your hardware definition language. For FPGA development there is software that takes your hardware definition file and actually routes out all the logic on the chip. Conceptually your code defines how the logic blocks that are in the chip are connected together. The software handles all the routing of signals across the chip. Some of them even allow you to change which FPGA chip is and shows how much of the chip is consumed with the logic demanded by the hardware definition code. Asic development is a somewhat different algorithm that operates on the same code. The issue with ASIC development is that it is very expensive to tool up a semiconductor plant for a new design, and there are many things that need to be done in order to have automated testing, packaging, etc. Something that I think is pretty interesting is that there are some products that rely on having reprogrammable logic, where having an FPGA is advantageous. One product like this is cable boxes. They actually reprogram themselves to receive different channels, or signals from different geographical areas, allowing the cable company to hold onto the boxes and update them to recieve new methods of receiving the cable signal as they change over time. A chip that is a really good learning recourse for this kind of thing is the Zynq 7000 chip from xilinx. It is an ARM 9 core surrounded with FPGA logic. What's cool about this is that every single pin on it is reprogrammable, you can actually define the hardware on any pin, with very few limitations. If you want to blink an led on one you can set up the logic to do that. If you want to have a serial port on another you can. If you want to add some digital signal processing to lighten the load for the arm 9 core you can as well. The main issue behind the Gsync moniors that I see is that they used a module rather than homegrown hardware. I can empathise with their decision though because FPGA design can be difficult. They are high pin count devices that require precision soldering. They often require a lot of stuff around the chip such as multiple supply rails and their own flash memory. If you want to see the ultimate preformance for this type of product behold the NetFPGA SUME. store.digilentinc.com/netfpga-sume-virtex-7-fpga-development-board/

Well, when this stuff comes down in price, I'll be interested. Intriguing as this thing is, at $1k for the board alone, it's expensive af. I don't even want to know how much the expansion board costs.

Review: RISCEON-VII

This is the third time I've taken a look at SiFive, and I still don't really see the big picture. I think some real-world examples would help. What's a specific situation where this tech has clear advantages? What sort of production volume or budget is needed to make custom silicon practical? This video does a great job of explaining the tech, but the business case for it is still too abstract to get excited about it.