the year was 2018
which actually now that i think about it wasn't really that long ago but things
are moving really fast and it's already time for an update so earlier this year
we did a video about the first ever open source CPU architecture risk 5 in
collaboration with sci-5 the makers of
the first ever commercial risk 5 hardware and today today we get to go
deeper so sci-fi sponsored our trip down
to their headquarters in san francisco to see some early concepts of real
hardware products that are being built using their ip all the way from a normal
SSD like what you'd install in your pc or laptop to a functioning media server
and it might not look like much but buried under this mess of wires as
there so often is darby treasure
let's start with risk fives benefits in a nutshell one it's brand new which
means that it sheds a lot of the legacy bloat that accompanies traditional
processor architectures making it both extremely scalable and extremely power
efficient and two it's open source which
means no expensive licensing fees for the companies that use it in their
products it always comes down to money doesn't it
but it has some problems even if you had an
open source CPU architecture and you
knew how to build a CPU unless you're already vc backed out the butt and you
can scrape together a minimum order quantity on the order of hundreds of
thousands of chips a foundry like tsmc or global foundries is very unlikely to
even pick up the phone that is where sci-fi's real plan for the
future comes in so today if you
yeah you like you right there need to build a custom chip for some reason
let's say uh you want to build a microcontroller for a car or a smart
thermostat there's a good chance that you would need to build an entire team
of people that specialize in chip design and manufacturing looks expensive but
check this out in the same way that large-scale computing has largely moved
from servers in a closet under the stairs to the cloud where processing
power storage and network speed can be ordered a la carte
sci-5 has created the pizza ordering app
of custom chip development so you jump onto their website select
things like performance memory size the type of ports and
interfaces that you want and then as you go it generates a block diagram for you
in real time then you click build and it goes to a
cloud instance that chugs away generating and verifying the processor
that you defined then the next day you can download the
verilog rtl and fpga images that you can
then program onto a board and you're ready to rock
it's basically self-serve this is in stark contrast to
working with a traditional ip provider where you might have to sign an nda and
hand over some fat stacks before getting anywhere close to actually testing your
software on your custom chip now right now sci-fi core designer only
works for the CPU but in the future they'll integrate third-party
intellectual property like graphics controllers and allow customers to build
an entire soc through their web interface and then if they want to take
it a step further they can even have the chips fabbed and delivered through
scifi's partnership with tsmc
so the demo room then finally it starts with the sci-fi
fu540 the same computer that was previously running quake in our office
currently it's actually doing something a little different it's playing a
youtube video here which might not seem
that impressive but this is more of a
software compatibility demo so the operating system that's running here is
debian Linux with no risk 5 special
expertise required in order to use it now it's the daily update stream so you
can expect frequent updates but
if you wanted to install some random application let's say a firefox you just
app get install to be clear
no one at sci-5 is trying to convince average consumers to run out and buy one
of these boards and run it at home
outside of software from the package manager
very little will run at this time don't expect to download steam and start
gaming or whatever but the message here is that compatibility is improving about
94 of the packages in the debian repository support risk 5 and other
flavors of Linux are working as well including fedora open wrt and open
embedded and performance is improving too so web browsing
yeah it's actually super slow right now like let's go ahead and go to our
website
oh boy but the problem here
is that the engine behind the browser
doesn't have a javascript just in time compiler so it's kind of like having a
10 year old engine on a brand new car
with more optimization that should get as much as 10 times faster about
equivalent to an entry-level quad-core army 53 which as some of you probably
realize still isn't an overabundance of
performance if only there was some way to add
co-processing capability to it
oh wait there is so this demo right here comes courtesy
of microsemi a microchip company these
guys build field programmable gate arrays and fpgas are expensive but these
things are really cool so basically they're hardware chips that you can
program to offload certain workloads to
hardware rather than software allowing your device to perform a specific task
in this case computer vision really really quickly
so their plan is actually to take this entire thing here and turn it into a
single soc that they're calling polar fire marrying risk fives real-time Linux
capabilities to their programmability with full cache and memory coherency i'm
going to challenge this thing let's try a chair
what do you think can you do a chair oh airplane
wait ah there it is not had it for a second chair
it's still early still early days but hey person scott person confirmed here
first Linus is a real person
and it gets even more modular the risk five foundation includes some really
influential members these days including NVIDIA who has one of their nvdla deep learning
accelerators running the yolo you only look once algorithm for object detection
so in a similar fashion to the last demo we saw it pulls images from the webcam
here pushes them into the nvdla's buffers where the object is detected
then it displays the results on the monitor it's just a more powerful
example of fundamentally the same idea
let's see if it picks up the phone yeah look at that and the scalability goes
down as well so this is sci-fi's fe310
on a high five one board it's an embedded board that is physically
compatible with arduino but with about 10 times the performance
so the demo we're looking at here doesn't look like much but
what we're seeing is that it can work on a computational task in the background
and a real-time one which is the blinking of these leds right here so
there is a performance penalty to our led going off exactly on time
interrupting whatever else is going on but for some applications like medical
for example key tasks need to be performed
right now and actually this design across the table from upbeat is
targeting the chinese fitness wearable industry and is expected to show up in
future devices from huami it integrates a similar e3 series core but with extra
ip including a cnn or convolutional neural network and a graphics
accelerator it looks really big but this is just development stuff it's right
there cool huh now this next station is a
little more relatable for pc enthusiasts we talked at considerable length
recently about the complexity of pushing SSD performance up when nand flash
performance has gone down in recent years it requires very high speed
controller chips and scifi's partner fadu is actually working on what they
hope will be the fastest consumer SSD on the market with a planned ship date of
q3 2019 so this here is a fadoo asic
with three sci-5 e51 core ips so that's
their 64-bit high performance embedded core and those are driving the SSD
controller algorithms that do all of the page mapping and whatnot and fadu claims
that the sci-5 cores were one-third of the power and area of competing designs
now we couldn't plug it in to verify any of this it's still very early stages but
here's something we were able to plug in in years past
this home media server or nas device
from wd would have had an soc based on
licensed ARM intellectual property hooked up to its shingled magnetic
recording hard drive and then handling streaming media over your network to a
device like this laptop well
not today now they're really far away from talking
about performance at this point but the demo that you're seeing is running on
real risk five silicon with the cost savings that come with it and they're
hopeful that on top of a cost savings thanks to a greater degree of control
over the hardware they could create custom instructions that improve the
data path increasing performance dang leaving us with just a couple of
housekeeping items here so one sci-five had not one but three debugging tool
partners demoing their wares including iar sager and lauterbach and had a
couple really cool security demos this secure boot demo checks for a properly
signed Linux image and if everything's fine it boots normally but if
something's amiss this light goes off
wait for it
there it is bad evil Linux
cannot boot Linux authentication failed now obviously this is
not how it'll actually work in the real world but it's it's very cute
and then over here we have the hex 5 multi-zone demo
so the sci-5 processor is running this
motor control a console and a real-time program that's
making this led blink and each of them
is in its own bucket so the idea here is that if the
led blinker were to get attacked it can't turn around and in turn attack
your motor control
which basically concludes our portion of
today's exercise but you guys still have a homework assignment
this is pretty cool if you've ever even thought that chip design is kind of cool
go to sci-fi site and fire up their core designer just give it a try i think you
guys might be impressed at how cool it is even just as
like kind of a fun learning tool to look at what components there are to a CPU if
you've never really given it any thought anymore we're going to have that linked in the video description
so thanks to sci-fi for sponsoring this video thanks to you guys for watching it
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