Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
At the end of last month (November 27), The RISC-V and Linux foundation partnered up. Basically, RISC-V and the Linux Foundation agreed to a collaboration to accelerate open source development for the open source RISC-V ISA, starting with RISC-V starter guides for Linux. This month, the union brought forth the world’s first RISC-V-based FPGA SoC that runs Linux. At the RISC-V Summit in USA, Microchip’s Microsemi announced a PolarFire SoC architecture developed in collaboration with SiFive. The PolarFire SoC is supposed to be the world’s first RISC-V based FPGA. The cores being 1.5GHz U54-MC which are about the equivalent of Cortex-A35 cores. The link to their website is here: https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/fpgas/3854-polarfire-fpgas
There will be another fascinating link at the end of this piece.image credit: Microsemi
This new SoC will compete with ARM SOC's and boasts lower power usage. The U54-MC's are manufactured at 28nm. Intel has the Stratix 10, manufactured at 14nm, which it will also compete against, with the open RISC-V design and lower power consumption. “With the PolarFire SoC ISA, Linux and real-time can coexist side-by-side in a more elegant fashion than we’ve seen before“ - Microchip’s director of product marketing.
RISC-V’s low power consumption is attributed in part to its simplicity (branch prediction is turned off), which makes it faster, easier to customize and debug, and secure against threats, says Microchip. The PolarFire FPGA architecture is notable for its low power consumption, which Microchip claims to be up to 50 percent lower than SRAM based FPGAs. (Have they mentioned low power consumption enough yet?).
The Linux driven development platform supplied by Microchip consists of the HiFive unleashed SBC and the HiFive unleashed expansion board. (That really expensive one on crowdsupply). More information here: http://linuxgizmos.com/fpga-based-add-on-board-brings-pcie-to-the-first-linux-based-risc-v-sbc/
“Microchip is supporting the SoC design with its PolarFire Mi-V RISC-V ecosystem. It also announced a Mi-V Embedded Experts Program, a “worldwide partner network to assist customers in hardware/software designs for PolarFire SoC.” Services include full product life-cycle support, access to direct technical support, and early access to development platforms and silicon.” according to an article.
The SoC may be based on open standards, but it is not open source. This seems to be a very interesting project, please read more here: https://investor.microsemi.com/2018-12-04-Industrys-First-RISC-V-SoC-FPGA-Architecture-Brings-Real-Time-to-Linux-Giving-Developers-the-Freedom-to-Innovate-in-Low-Power-Secure-and-Reliable-Designs
All in all, the PolarFire looks to be welcome edition to the Linux stable.