On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 5:44 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:

yeh the same team that was mentioned last week. suggestions on how to contact them appreciated.

From that link:

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN A EARLY ACCESS TO THE C-CLASS (64-BIT) PLEASE MAIL US AT: Madhusudan : gs dot madhusudan at cse dot iitm dot ac dot in Neel Gala : neelgala at gmail dot com

C class

32 and 64 bit 3-8 stage in-order core aimed at 10 Mhz - 1 Ghz controller requiremenets Optional memory protection and MMU Very low power static design varinats Fault Tolerant variants for ISO26262 applications IoT variants will have compressed/reduced ISA support Optional FPU, VPU Bus - AHB variants

To me it looks like the first one is too slow for general purpose computing, we would need the absolute maximum configuration to make something useful as a desktop chip. The I class is probably better suited.

I class

64-bit, 1-8 core, 8+ stage out of order, aimed at 200 Mhz - 2 Ghz industrial control / general purpose applications Shared L2 cache, dual threading support, SIMD/VPU BUS - Shakti NoC + AXI4

This is the HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684225

The lead architect of this project( username gsmadhusudan) has some more comments about it:

Yes, we will update the C Class next month since our private line has a lot of foundry specific code that needs to be removed. The I class needs more work but the design is in place. It will also move to quad issue and would be a Cortex A72/75 class core. More importantly the basic slow IPs, UART, I2C, quad/Octal SPI, SDRAM controller, JTAG, DMA, PLIC will be FPGA and silicon proven and production quality. Will be very useful to other developers (non RISC-V also) as would the AXI bus.

Cortex A72 is a pretty big core that just made it into a phone thermal budget with the first generation 16nm finfet process. One example is the kirin 950( found in the huawei Mate 8). From anandtech's review here are 2 links about power consumption:

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/9878/power-big.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/9878/CPUVolt.png

Full review here( and please don't ask me about non-free js on the article): https://www.anandtech.com/show/9878/the-huawei-mate-8-review/3

Phones usually take around 3 watts tdp, so it looks like something of this class could fit on an eoma68 card. Obviously the "optional fpu-vpu" part remains a big question, while there also needs to be someone who think they can sell a few million of these so they get manufactured on a good enough node.