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 "FPGA Softcore SoC shootout" - six cores compared 
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Joined: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:54 pm
Posts: 1780
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An interesting blog post:
FPGA Softcore SoC shootout

Image

6 cores, 5 architectures, including POWER, SPARC and RISC-V.
One very small, some very fast.

Quote:
The ZPU is tiny. really tiny. A small SoC with a uart is 469 LUTs and 287 FFs The CPU alone uses 369 LUTs and 189 FFs.


Quote:
Some things stand out. 4 cores are 1000 LUTs or smaller and the other 2 are a lot bigger. This most likely is due to build in multiplier/divider blocks, which can be disabled on a CPU like Vexriscv. With 6 CPU’s tested I have tried 5 different CPU architectures. Only RISCV was in 2 CPU’s, but there are a lot of other RISC-V CPU projects.

All in all, this was a fun project to do, and took quite some evenings in total. There are a lot of other CPU’s and I cannot test them all. And frankly, I have seen enough CPU’s for now :)



Mon Jun 22, 2020 6:05 pm
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Joined: Wed Nov 20, 2019 12:56 pm
Posts: 92
Nice to see ZPUFlex getting a mention there - that was one of my previous pet projects!


Mon Jun 22, 2020 6:47 pm
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Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2019 2:41 am
Posts: 585
I say this more like comparing apples to oranges.
Important details are masked out by the WOW speed factor
of the VHDL compiler used amd the best FPGA.
I think the first version of Micro Baze
was hand compiled for speed. Using 16 bit x 1 Xilinx block rams
as a 16 x n register file and tristate logic for the ALU.
This was 20 years ago, and the link has vanished off the web.
Compare say clock cycles for instructions, and I bet most
Risc's run at the same speed.
Ben.
PS: Found the site. You have to dig a bit for the first cpu version.
http://fpgacpu.org/index.html
Let us see today vs 20 years ago.


Mon Jun 22, 2020 10:47 pm
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Joined: Wed Nov 20, 2019 12:56 pm
Posts: 92
oldben wrote:
I say this more like comparing apples to oranges.
Important details are masked out by the WOW speed factor
of the VHDL compiler used amd the best FPGA.


I think you might be looking at it from a different angle from the author - I think the intention here is "So you're working on an FPGA project and you need to embed a CPU to handle housekeeping tasks. Here are some options, with the pros and cons of each."

Quote:
Compare say clock cycles for instructions, and I bet most
Risc's run at the same speed.


Well he does quote DMIPS/MHz, and yes most RISC designs will have pretty similar performance - certainly within an order of magnitude - so other factors (such as footprint and how painful the CPU is to integrate or debug) will be a tiebreaker when deciding which to use.

Quote:
PS: Found the site. You have to dig a bit for the first cpu version.
http://fpgacpu.org/index.html
Let us see today vs 20 years ago.


Looks like some good reading material there - thanks for the link.


Tue Jun 23, 2020 8:06 am
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