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by rwmj 397 days ago
Love FPGAs, but they're not very practical if you need to run a non-toy Linux on RISC-V. They will typically top out at 100 MHz for the kind of FPGAs that you and I can afford to buy, and have other problems like limited RAM.
1 comments

Precursor just happens to use Xilinx Spartan 7-class, a 100 MHz VexRISC-V, RV32IMAC + MMU, 4k L1 I/D cache. But these days you could buy Versal devices with 1M+ LUT, and up to 100K DSP slices, in under a thou. However, integrating it—would be the real challenge. The FPGA hardware is sufficient for many non-toy Linux applications; open hardware isn't. This is a gateware limitation, not a hardware one.