[Libre-soc-dev] Alibaba open sources four RISC-V cores

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 9:18 AM Lauri Kasanen <cand at gmx.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Alibaba open-sources cores from the E902 micro-controller class core to
> the C910 core for servers in data centers. Verilog, toolchains etc

cool!  is this the one that had that paper published about it? the one with
the custom extensions that critically increase performance?  according to this:
https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910/blob/main/doc/%E7%8E%84%E9%93%81C910%E7%94%A8%E6%88%B7%E6%89%8B%E5%86%8C.pdf

section 3.2.1 p20 through to 3.2.3 it looks like there are about *EIGHTY*
custom instructions added!

that's basically going to cause absolute merry havoc with the RISC-V
ecosystem if adopted de-facto world-wide.

> available under Apache.

ah.  turns out that the Apache Software License has no explicit clause
covering patent licensing / indemnification for Hardware.  has plenty
of clauses for software - just not for hardware.

l.