Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 24 Apr 2003 15:32:10 -0400 | From | Timothy Miller <> | Subject | Re: Flame Linus to a crisp! |
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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. :)
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