Design Your Own CPU!!!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,986 words · ~9 min read
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the year was 2018
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which actually now that i think about it wasn't really that long ago but things
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are moving really fast and it's already time for an update so earlier this year
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we did a video about the first ever open source CPU architecture risk 5 in
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collaboration with sci-5 the makers of
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the first ever commercial risk 5 hardware and today today we get to go
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deeper so sci-fi sponsored our trip down
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to their headquarters in san francisco to see some early concepts of real
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hardware products that are being built using their ip all the way from a normal
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SSD like what you'd install in your pc or laptop to a functioning media server
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and it might not look like much but buried under this mess of wires as
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there so often is darby treasure
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let's start with risk fives benefits in a nutshell one it's brand new which
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means that it sheds a lot of the legacy bloat that accompanies traditional
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processor architectures making it both extremely scalable and extremely power
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efficient and two it's open source which
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means no expensive licensing fees for the companies that use it in their
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products it always comes down to money doesn't it
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but it has some problems even if you had an
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open source CPU architecture and you
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knew how to build a CPU unless you're already vc backed out the butt and you
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can scrape together a minimum order quantity on the order of hundreds of
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thousands of chips a foundry like tsmc or global foundries is very unlikely to
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even pick up the phone that is where sci-fi's real plan for the
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future comes in so today if you
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yeah you like you right there need to build a custom chip for some reason
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let's say uh you want to build a microcontroller for a car or a smart
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thermostat there's a good chance that you would need to build an entire team
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of people that specialize in chip design and manufacturing looks expensive but
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check this out in the same way that large-scale computing has largely moved
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from servers in a closet under the stairs to the cloud where processing
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power storage and network speed can be ordered a la carte
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sci-5 has created the pizza ordering app
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of custom chip development so you jump onto their website select
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things like performance memory size the type of ports and
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interfaces that you want and then as you go it generates a block diagram for you
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in real time then you click build and it goes to a
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cloud instance that chugs away generating and verifying the processor
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that you defined then the next day you can download the
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verilog rtl and fpga images that you can
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then program onto a board and you're ready to rock
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it's basically self-serve this is in stark contrast to
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working with a traditional ip provider where you might have to sign an nda and
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hand over some fat stacks before getting anywhere close to actually testing your
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software on your custom chip now right now sci-fi core designer only
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works for the CPU but in the future they'll integrate third-party
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intellectual property like graphics controllers and allow customers to build
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an entire soc through their web interface and then if they want to take
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it a step further they can even have the chips fabbed and delivered through
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scifi's partnership with tsmc
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so the demo room then finally it starts with the sci-fi
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fu540 the same computer that was previously running quake in our office
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currently it's actually doing something a little different it's playing a
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youtube video here which might not seem
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that impressive but this is more of a
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software compatibility demo so the operating system that's running here is
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debian Linux with no risk 5 special
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expertise required in order to use it now it's the daily update stream so you
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can expect frequent updates but
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if you wanted to install some random application let's say a firefox you just
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app get install to be clear
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no one at sci-5 is trying to convince average consumers to run out and buy one
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of these boards and run it at home
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outside of software from the package manager
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very little will run at this time don't expect to download steam and start
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gaming or whatever but the message here is that compatibility is improving about
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94 of the packages in the debian repository support risk 5 and other
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flavors of Linux are working as well including fedora open wrt and open
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embedded and performance is improving too so web browsing
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yeah it's actually super slow right now like let's go ahead and go to our
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website
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oh boy but the problem here
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is that the engine behind the browser
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doesn't have a javascript just in time compiler so it's kind of like having a
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10 year old engine on a brand new car
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with more optimization that should get as much as 10 times faster about
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equivalent to an entry-level quad-core army 53 which as some of you probably
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realize still isn't an overabundance of
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performance if only there was some way to add
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co-processing capability to it
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oh wait there is so this demo right here comes courtesy
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of microsemi a microchip company these
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guys build field programmable gate arrays and fpgas are expensive but these
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things are really cool so basically they're hardware chips that you can
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program to offload certain workloads to
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hardware rather than software allowing your device to perform a specific task
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in this case computer vision really really quickly
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so their plan is actually to take this entire thing here and turn it into a
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single soc that they're calling polar fire marrying risk fives real-time Linux
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capabilities to their programmability with full cache and memory coherency i'm
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going to challenge this thing let's try a chair
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what do you think can you do a chair oh airplane
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wait ah there it is not had it for a second chair
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it's still early still early days but hey person scott person confirmed here
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first Linus is a real person
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and it gets even more modular the risk five foundation includes some really
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influential members these days including NVIDIA who has one of their nvdla deep learning
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accelerators running the yolo you only look once algorithm for object detection
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so in a similar fashion to the last demo we saw it pulls images from the webcam
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here pushes them into the nvdla's buffers where the object is detected
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then it displays the results on the monitor it's just a more powerful
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example of fundamentally the same idea
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let's see if it picks up the phone yeah look at that and the scalability goes
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down as well so this is sci-fi's fe310
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on a high five one board it's an embedded board that is physically
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compatible with arduino but with about 10 times the performance
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so the demo we're looking at here doesn't look like much but
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what we're seeing is that it can work on a computational task in the background
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and a real-time one which is the blinking of these leds right here so
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there is a performance penalty to our led going off exactly on time
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interrupting whatever else is going on but for some applications like medical
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for example key tasks need to be performed
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right now and actually this design across the table from upbeat is
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targeting the chinese fitness wearable industry and is expected to show up in
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future devices from huami it integrates a similar e3 series core but with extra
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ip including a cnn or convolutional neural network and a graphics
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accelerator it looks really big but this is just development stuff it's right
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there cool huh now this next station is a
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little more relatable for pc enthusiasts we talked at considerable length
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recently about the complexity of pushing SSD performance up when nand flash
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performance has gone down in recent years it requires very high speed
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controller chips and scifi's partner fadu is actually working on what they
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hope will be the fastest consumer SSD on the market with a planned ship date of
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q3 2019 so this here is a fadoo asic
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with three sci-5 e51 core ips so that's
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their 64-bit high performance embedded core and those are driving the SSD
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controller algorithms that do all of the page mapping and whatnot and fadu claims
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that the sci-5 cores were one-third of the power and area of competing designs
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now we couldn't plug it in to verify any of this it's still very early stages but
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here's something we were able to plug in in years past
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this home media server or nas device
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from wd would have had an soc based on
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licensed ARM intellectual property hooked up to its shingled magnetic
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recording hard drive and then handling streaming media over your network to a
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device like this laptop well
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not today now they're really far away from talking
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about performance at this point but the demo that you're seeing is running on
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real risk five silicon with the cost savings that come with it and they're
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hopeful that on top of a cost savings thanks to a greater degree of control
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over the hardware they could create custom instructions that improve the
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data path increasing performance dang leaving us with just a couple of
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housekeeping items here so one sci-five had not one but three debugging tool
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partners demoing their wares including iar sager and lauterbach and had a
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couple really cool security demos this secure boot demo checks for a properly
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signed Linux image and if everything's fine it boots normally but if
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something's amiss this light goes off
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wait for it
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there it is bad evil Linux
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cannot boot Linux authentication failed now obviously this is
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not how it'll actually work in the real world but it's it's very cute
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and then over here we have the hex 5 multi-zone demo
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so the sci-5 processor is running this
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motor control a console and a real-time program that's
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making this led blink and each of them
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is in its own bucket so the idea here is that if the
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led blinker were to get attacked it can't turn around and in turn attack
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your motor control
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which basically concludes our portion of
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today's exercise but you guys still have a homework assignment
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this is pretty cool if you've ever even thought that chip design is kind of cool
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go to sci-fi site and fire up their core designer just give it a try i think you
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guys might be impressed at how cool it is even just as
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like kind of a fun learning tool to look at what components there are to a CPU if
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you've never really given it any thought anymore we're going to have that linked in the video description
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so thanks to sci-fi for sponsoring this video thanks to you guys for watching it
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