Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

Balram Adlakha
2003-04-24T19:28:20Z

On Friday 25 Apr 2003 1:02 am, Timothy Miller wrote:
> 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. :)

By the way, I'm just curious, I don't have much knowledge of this, can anyone
create a processor with the x86 instruction set and sell it? Like did AMD and
transmeta and all get a license from Intel?