AnyCPU
http://anycpu.org/forum/

"FPGA Softcore SoC shootout" - six cores compared
http://anycpu.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=750		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  BigEd [ Mon Jun 22, 2020 6:05 pm ]
Post subject:  "FPGA Softcore SoC shootout" - six cores compared
.
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 :)
Author:  robinsonb5 [ Mon Jun 22, 2020 6:47 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: "FPGA Softcore SoC shootout" - six cores compared
Nice to see ZPUFlex getting a mention there - that was one of my previous pet projects!
Author:  oldben [ Mon Jun 22, 2020 10:47 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: "FPGA Softcore SoC shootout" - six cores compared
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.
Author:  robinsonb5 [ Tue Jun 23, 2020 8:06 am ]
Post subject:  Re: "FPGA Softcore SoC shootout" - six cores compared
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.
Page 1 of 1 All times are UTC
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
http://www.phpbb.com/