[libre-riscv-dev] status dec 2019

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

hi all, just a quick status update.

am still here in canada, helping my associates start this business doing
ebikes. http://www.teznic.com it's a long story, however yes down the line
we want collision avoidance warnings (like the new damon electric
motorcycle), self driving gyros, and a mesh network etc.

funnily enough we'll need a decent processor for all that, so there is a
way to bring in Canada R&D funding.  the general idea being, here: the
company my associates are setting up, they "get it" and will be a major
customer.

for NLnet, with help from everyone, i answered the questions for Michiel,
on the applications, the main thing that happened was that the external
reviewers were really surprised at the difference in the amounts from the
first application.

for the 2018 application, it was really just me and jacob, at appx
1200-1500 and 1000-1100 a month, respectively, with room for others as
well, part time.  both of us have modest requirements and are highly
motivated to see this project be a success.

these new applications, it is radically different. we need to *find* and
thus be in a position to financially motivate and attract people, mostly
from the EU and the West, and that means a budget per person of around EUR
3000 a month.

in the first application the modest financial requirements set an
expectation that the external reviewers were a bit... "surprised" by.
fortunately i was able to give adequate answers based on the information
each project / group gave.

we did however have to reduce the number of iterations for the R&D at the
hardware experimentation side. i did explain to Michiel that if we do so,
it could result in a product that is not commercially viable (i.e not
hardware optimised enough). he *may* be able to keep the budget up at the
requested levels.

the strategy here is to get the video and 3D projects each working in
software first (unoptimised) then add SimpleV then add accelerated opcodes
(most likely one by one) to see if they improve efficiency and performance.
this last part is what has had its budget cut, reducing the number of
possible hardware-related iterations.

we will hear soon enough and will have to start putting together some
milestones, for each project.

the ones i took off the list are the opencl one and the gcc one. the gcc
one realistically needs a quarter of a million dollars minimum, to attract
people with the right level of expertise.  opencl can be done later.

l.



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crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68