Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

[Timothy Miller]

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.  :)