requirement for PC for VHDL design

Why lol?

Why lol?

kristoff probably meant RISC-V. But he is one of these people thinking that using proper case nad proper punctuation is above them...

X and A don't have ARM11s on their chips. They have much more modern and much more fast ARM Cortex-A9.

Because this laptop is a major piece of crap. Seems the Lenovo consumer brand aims for a rock bottom price at the expense of quality. It has many issues and is much worse than the Toshiba I had before (which I wasn't totally fond of).

In contrast, getting 16 GB of main memory makes it run many apps well in that regard. My previous machine only had 4 GB which was very limiting.

It is the only thing of any value in this piece of crap laptop... well, that and the separate graphics memory. Actually, the display is poor quality having only a very narrow angle of clear viewing. Sometimes when I watch movies I have to choose if I want to see the top or the bottom of the screen clearly, not both.

I stand corrected. The point is they have much higher end CPUs than the CM3 (or CM4) in the Microsemi chip.

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Rick C

Rickman,

Yes. A very valid point.

I bought a cheap powered USB 3.0 hub and both the Chinese clones of the Altera USB Blaster and Salea Logic Analyser work without a problem. (under linux, that is).

No, I meant risc-v. See

It's an open ISA being developed at MIT (or, in fact, a family of ISAs) and there are already a couple of open-source implementations of them.

64 bit versions: Lowrisc:

SiFive:

32 bit versions: Pulpino:

f32c:

as used here:

Seams like a fun project to play around with.

Olimex has released an open-source sketch for a programmer:

This is for their ICE40HX1K board.

Cheerio! Kr. Bonne.

USB is one of those things that sounds great in theory, but has problems in practice. Windows doesn't help.

Oh, my bad, you wrote riscv and I read "riscy". lol I'm familiar with risc-v, but the way you talk about the FPGAs they already have a processor in them. I thought you were talking about the FPGA, but you mean you want to try the risc-v core and the FPGA is just the vehicle.

That's a 45 minute video! But I did watch the first few minutes and saw the FPGA board mounted on the rPi as its dev system. Pretty cool.

But I don't think that alone indicates economy of memory. The chips they target are only a few kLUTs rather than 100s or 1000s of kLUTs. Still it's interesting. I have an iCE40 project on the back burner that would be interesting to try with this dev system. I've just never taken the time to study it enough to get it up and running.

Getting a riscv running in an iCE40 is a feat. They only come up to 8 kLUTs. But still, that's not interesting to me. I am interested in processors that only use a few hundred LUTs.

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Rick C

The total size of files touched is of the order of gigabytes.

That doesn't help if you're touching the file for the first time. In the case of building collections of IP you scan the library files (lots of small verilog files) which means lots of small reads of disparate files.

Bear in mind that FPGA builds are long enough that the files may go into the cache, but they aren't there when your build completes after an hour and you start a new build. On 16GB-class desktops/laptops there's enough going on that the cache probably doesn't stick around long enough.

Theo

That is true, for the first time you read them (after booting, or waking from sleep). Thereafter the files are in the cache.

The key here is to have enough memory so that this does not happen. That is a challenge on a laptop, because you seldom get lots of memory - but on a desktop/workstation for FPGA design, 24 GB or 32 GB is not going to be unreasonable (32 GB is a similar price to a reasonable SSD).

Do you work on the train? Or is the requirement simply for portability?

One of our remote workers uses a Skull Canyon NUC. This has an i7 with EDRAM so is reasonably quick a Quartus compiles. It's about 5% off the best out there (the i7-5775c) - the EDRAM is shared with the GPU and there's no way to plug in an external GPU. It's a 'portable desktop' rather than a laptop - he has a second power supply, so just needs to carry the NUC around and plug it into power, USB and monitor in each place. Intel have put a lot of effort into the cooling solution for such a small package - it's not a

95W desktop, but performance is pretty close.

One possible advantage of the NUC is you can point at it and say 'HP don't sell anything like that' which might work around purchasing requirements.

Otherwise I'd suggest looking at graphics workstation laptops (eg Xeon). I'm not familiar with what HP have, but likely small and light they aren't.

Theo