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by tpearson-raptor 2447 days ago
Microwatt is the first fully open POWER core:

https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt

It's also structured very well, quite clean for learning purposes etc. The current goal so far as I know is to perfect this core, and fork for a more complex / powerful variant. Maybe by the time that's done, the open FPGA tooling will have caught up enough to be able to run a usefully fast (~200MHz) POWER soft core, all in FPGA logic...

I'd strongly prefer a ppc64 core over a RISC-V core for one simple reason: we have a wide deployed base of very powerful ppc64 machines, and not having to keep cross compilers and related environments around is a massive streamlining step that we don't even know the full effects of yet (it hasn't been legal until now to have the SoC under development running the same architecture as the high end workstations and servers used to develop [for] it). The demo of using mainline GCC on a POWER box to build a binary for the Microwatt (that would also run on the host with KVM, if desired, for fast trace and debug) was most impressive.