From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263823AbTDXTDd (ORCPT ); Thu, 24 Apr 2003 15:03:33 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263824AbTDXTDd (ORCPT ); Thu, 24 Apr 2003 15:03:33 -0400 Received: from watch.techsource.com ([209.208.48.130]:52220 "EHLO techsource.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263823AbTDXTDc (ORCPT ); Thu, 24 Apr 2003 15:03:32 -0400 Message-ID: <3EA83BBA.5060502@techsource.com> Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 15:32:10 -0400 From: Timothy Miller User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Daniel Phillips CC: Linus Torvalds , John Bradford , Jamie Lokier , William Lee Irwin III , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Flame Linus to a crisp! References: <20030424190207.319431257A9@mx12.arcor-online.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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. :)