Subject: Re: Minimal ALU instruction set.
Date: 19 May 1998 00:00:00 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.arch.fpga,comp.arch.embedded

Peter wrote in message <3561443d.214920709@news.netcomuk.co.uk>...
>
>I may have missed the original post, but may I ask why anyone wants to
>do this project? Is it just an exercise?

>
>Many people have thought about doing a CPU in an FPGA, but AFAIK it is
>always a futile exercise because one can buy a CPU with a given
>capability for far less than the cost of the FPGA.

You're right. But what fun! I used to envy processor designers in industry
and academia. Now I can do my own processors, on-chip peripherals, cache,
etc. In fact, I have it far better. I can design the entire system, the
ISA, the microarchitecture, and get working hardware in a few days. In
contrast, the typical big company CPU designer works for months at a stretch
on a small piece of a huge and complex system. And there is a certain
pleasure in minimalism and self-sufficiency.

It is one thing to read about simple microarchitectures in H&P, it is
another to go build and debug and boot them. You can "squish the CLBs
between your toes" -- you become familiar with the same pipe stages, clock
speed, area, IPC tradeoffs, although your units are CLBs and ns rather than
rbes and ps.

The resulting designs are only as fast as seven year old commodity
processors, but that's OK. Maybe 20X a VAX is fast enough for your
application -- you don't need 200X a VAX. And whether you have a StrongARM,
an R4640, or a custom FPGA CPU, you are using the same external memory, more
or less -- cache misses still cost 100 ns.

True, commodity processors are cheaper on an absolute basis, especially if
you don't take into account total system cost. But FPGA prices are coming
down. By end of 1998, the Xilinx XCS20 will be $6.50 Q100K (ref:
http://www.xilinx.com/prs_rls/spartan.htm). This part, equivalent to the
XC4010 that hosts the J32 (1995), can implement a 33 MHz conventional
pipelined 32-bit RISC processor leaving 5,000 gates of logic for
system-on-chip peripherals. You will soon be able to build highly
integrated and customized glueless systems with just FPGA+SDRAM for ~$10.
And there is the soon-to-be-$3 XCS05, adequate for a nice little 10 MIPS
16-bit processor with logic to spare.

Implications/Predictions
(some from other folks)

* falling FPGA prices will eventually clamp an upper bound on the price of
many custom parts, including embedded CPUs

* RISC CPU design is no longer rocket science -- HDLs, tools, and the FPGA's
abstraction of all the hard EE, means that undergrads will increasingly
design their own processors. Of course, these designs will never complete
with commodity microprocessors for specmarks.

* a number of these designs will be published under GPL or put in the public
domain. There will be communities of users of certain free CPU designs,
similar to the open software movement. There will be GCC tools chains,
lunatic fringe Linux ports, etc.

* there will be free implementations of legacy ISAs. Or perhaps free
implementations of cross-assemblers/cross-loaders from legacy ISAs to
simplified minimalist FPGA CPU ISAs.

* embedded CPU vendors will start to ship with some FPGA on chip (Motorola
and Atmel have announced this).

Jan Gray
(J32 described at http://www3.sympatico.ca/jsgray/homebrew.htm)