[libre-riscv-dev] chinese sponsor, looking to design an ECP5-based dev board

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 4:17 PM Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
<lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
>  also, some form of compression may be beneficial: this is something
> that i understand many AI ASIC designers are looking at.  they have
> upwards of 4,000 processors on a *single* chip.  MASSIVE interconnect,
> and staggeringly-high on-chip data transfer rates.  without data
> compression it would be unmanageable.

I think compression is probably going to have diminishing returns,
where the extra hardware complexity to compress and decompress data
takes more time than just transferring the uncompressed data,
especially for our SoC, which doesn't have thousands of processors.
Also, this sounds like a patent minefield (not that we can't work
around that).

Jacob