2020 Jun FSic2020 Eth Zurich, Switzerland

2020 Jun OpenPOWER Summit North America.

25 and 26 June we'll be in lovely Austin, TX, the same week and venue as the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit.

Study of SoCs (Allwinner, Rockchip, NXP) shows none are fully Libre
- Either GPU driver firmware is proprietary, or VPU firmware, or bootloader
This causes customer product development issues
- https://tinyurl.com/valve-steam-intel
Businesses are waking up to lack of transparency
- Intel Management Engine (spying backdoor co-processor)
- Spectre, Meltdown, CSME (Chain-of-Trust) issues
Solution: full transparency. All source available for everything.

Using Libre (rather than "open") development practices
- no "I'll release it when it's ready": all development is real-time public access
No NDAs, no hidden discussions
- we can invite anyone (any expert) to help with review
- free to ask for help anywhere in the world (comp.arch, stackexchange)
Using litex, nmigen, opencores HDL
- heavily depending on python OO (not possible with VHDL or Verilog)
- leap-frogging ahead by not reinventing the wheel
- yosys converts nmigen to verilog for standard tools.

LibreSOC is a hybrid CPU-VPU-GPU architecture.
- OpenPOWER ISA itself is extended to include 3D and Video instructions
- (SIN, ATAN2, YUV2RGB, Texture Interpolation)
- Only after approval of OpenPOWER Foundation!
- There is no separate GPU or VPU: it really is the same core.
- Massively simplifies driver development and application debugging
Vectorisation is "Simple-V" (VSX not being implemented)
- VSX is SIMD and is considered harmful
- https://www.sigarch.org/simd-instructions-considered-harmful/

First simple core achieved in simulation Sep 2020
- FPGA (ECP5) target followed shortly
First silicon tape-out 180nm deadline 2nd Dec 2020
- sponsored by NLnet, with help from Chips4Makers Libre Cell Libraries
- layout is entirely libre-licensed tools: coriolis2 from lip6.fr
Next chip is "SBC" style quad-core
- similar spec to Allwinner A64, Rockchip RK3399
- targets "Pi" boards, smartphones, tablets, Industrial IoT