To satisfy the true geeks, Western Digital organized a Swerv Deep Dive at the Bay Area RISC-V Meetup. The meetup was well organized (free food!) and attended by roughly 100 people.
A Webex recording of this meetup is currently still available here. (The first 53 minutes are empty. The meat of the presentation starts at the 53min30 mark.)
Zvonimir Bandic, Senior Director of Next Generation Platform Technologies Department at Western Digital, gave an excellent presentation, well paced, little marketing fluff, with sufficient technical detail to pique my interest to dive deeper in the specifics of the core. I highly recommend watching the whole thing. There was also a second presentation about instruction tracing which I won’t talk about in this post.
In this blog post, I’ll go through the presentation and add some extra details that I noted down at the meetup or that were gathered while going through the SweRV source code on GitHub or while going through the RISC-V SweRV EH1 Programmer’s Reference.
This goes way beyond my comfort level.
I’m not a hardware geek. And I don’t follow RISC-V beyond random posts to places like this.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t find the process and progress exciting.
Save for a soul sucking web browser and AAA games, for the bulk of the tasks folks might need to do on a computer, we are far beyond the “fast enough”. Which opens the door far and wide to alternative architectures, and other mechanisms to help bifurcate the mono-cultures we have right now.
The Linux kernel, along with the *BSDs help work as a great equalizer for these architectures. In the end, computers are only as interesting as the problems they solve. While UNIX has it’s issues, the modern versions are like the CP/M of old. If you can get that running, a world of applications opens up to you. And thus the ability to readily get a machine to do meaningful work, quickly, materializes as if by magic.
The only other things holding these machines back is simply the market of scale, making entry in to it still a matter for the even more enthusiastic enthusiasts.
Which is one reason the Raspberry Pi and its ilk are such a delight. Flawed as they may be, at least they’re cheap.
I’m a hardware dude, so I love stuff like this. Thanks for helping keep track of these things. It gets harder every year to try to keep up with everything that goes on.