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  • p1esk - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    What is the smallest FPGA this will fit on?
    I've got Spartan 6 board (Nexus 3 from Digilent), wonder if it's big enough...
  • alexvoica - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    We recommend either a Digilent Nexys4 platform with a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA or the Terasic DE2 platform with an Altera Cyclone FPGA.
  • Jeffrey Bosboom - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    Is this a play to prevent RISC-V adoption in academia?
  • alexvoica - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    A lot of universities teach computer architecture based on MIPS CPUs so we wanted to offer them a way to augment their lab/seminar materials with a complete package that includes the full code for a Linux-running processor and all the tools they need to boot up and debug an operating system on an affordable FPGA platform.
  • UrQuan3 - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    The MIPS is a good one to learn CPU design and assembly on. I can confirm it's still used for teaching, and sorry this offer wasn't around when I was in that class.

    So, for those of us that are no longer in school, what would it take to have access to something like this? I assume it would be costly.
  • alexvoica - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    If you get involved with your alma mater (or any other university) in a research capacity, you would be able to access it - provided they register for the programme of course.
  • tecknohow - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link

    As a current student, I'm very interested in this - thank you guys. Assuming my institution registers for the program (which i bet they will as we do a lot in MIPS) will students be able to have direct access, or will it be restricted to only those in approved courses or doing research in specific fields?
  • V900 - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    Why look at this fella here! It's an Open Sourcus Fanaticus... And a lively fella, full grown. And feisty! This time of the day, you'd normally find them coding away in their burrows, but this one came out to defend its territory!

    As you can see it's a close relative to the False Flagus Fanaticus, it's smaller, more shy and universally loathed close cousin, which usually drones on about conspiracy theories, Kennedy and 9/11...

    The fact that the two are related to each other, is clearly evident by the conspiratorial bent of many Open Sourcus Fanaticus. They're always on the lookout for corporate stooges, and often see schemes and machinations to attack them, set in motion by the evil capitalist overlords, that no one else can see.

    It's a popular myth, that it is this constant warfare, that is preventing open source solutions from winning mass adoption.

    In reality, it's the fact that most open source solutions are usually piss poor, that is preventing them from becoming popular. The few that aren'tare usually quickly capitalized by hhe evil corporate overlord, eager for every hour of free labor they get thhrown at them.
  • DCide - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    Real life can be an odd mix of strategic planning and altruism. Perhaps they don't have to be mutually exclusive.
  • toyotabedzrock - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    V wasn't a movie about brave capitalists.
  • toyotabedzrock - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    It would appear that RISC-V is making rapid progress towards a massively scalable and commercially available design.
    https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/chisel-u...
  • Lord of the Bored - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link

    Never heard of RISC-V before today, so it backfired.
    But in my experience, they're a bit late since schools adopted MIPS YEARS ago.
  • iamkyle - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    Imagination Technologies!!!!

    Brings back memories of my PowerVR Kyro-II 64MB AGP card. I felt so badass having a card that beat the GeForce 2 GTS at a fraction of the price. Ahhh memories.
  • kfishy - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    I believe Lattice Semiconductor had also publicly released their LatticeMico32 soft processor (in fact under an open source license), but it has no MMU and thus cannot run full OS's like Linux, so I guess that part of Imagination's claim is still true. And anyway MIPS is a much bigger deal than some obscure FPGA-specific architecture.
  • nodak - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link

    I believe Sun's OpenSPARC might be a similar precedent, with a full 64-bit implementation released under the GPL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSPARC
  • Jeremiah43 - Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - link

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