Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

Timothy Miller
2003-04-24T19:03:33Z

Daniel Phillips wrote:

>On Thu 24 Apr 03 16:45, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>
>>If open hardware is what you want, FPGA's are actually getting to the
>>point where you can do real CPU's with them. They won't be gigahertz, and
>>they won't have big nice caches (but hey, you might make something that
>>clocks fairly close to memory speeds, so you might not care about the
>>latter once you have the former).
>>
>>They're even getting reasonably cheap.
>>
>>
>
>The big problem with FPGAs at the moment is that the vendors want you to use
>their tools, which come with license agreements that limit your options in
>arbitrary ways, otherwise this would be peachy.
>
>
>
>
For their smaller devices, Xilinx has a free "WebPack" which is a
complete Verilog synthesizer (I don't know if it does VHDL), as well as
place & route, of course. I think it'll do up to Virtex II 250. It
also tends use fewer gates for a given design than the version of
Leonardo Spectrum we have. It just doesn't have a simulator, which is
vital to any good development process. Also, the Web Pack only runs
under Windows. Maybe it'll work with WINE?

I've been working on my own 32-bit CPU design for FPGA lately. Maybe we
can get Linux to run on it. :)