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Third Party CPU Discussion / Re: Why haven't we seen boards with Power9 / MicroWatt?
« on: September 02, 2024, 06:15:44 pm »
I looked into this a long time ago and determined that the minimal investment required to produce actual silicon based on Microwatt was somewhere around $20 million. If Microwatt (or POWER in general) had the kind of interest RISC-V has, perhaps someone could raise that amount of money. As it stands right now, the only place we could ever hope of getting an actual chip from is IBM itself and I don't see that happening.
As for boards, there are people around who are skilled enough with KiCAD that an excellent open-source board could produced if a chip existed. For now, those of us who like to experiment with Microwatt have to be satisfied with FPGA soft cores running at extremely slow speeds (100 MHz and less).
As for boards, there are people around who are skilled enough with KiCAD that an excellent open-source board could produced if a chip existed. For now, those of us who like to experiment with Microwatt have to be satisfied with FPGA soft cores running at extremely slow speeds (100 MHz and less).
