[libre-riscv-dev] XDC video on open source & FPGAs

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 9:26 PM Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
<lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
>
> On Friday, November 15, 2019, Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > XDC 2019 | Everything Wrong With FPGAs - Ben Widawsky
> > https://youtu.be/AMkFuS_ZkrM
> >
> > I really liked this talk! (though the presenter did mess up on his
> > description of LUTs -- they're not clocked)
> >
> > Hopefully more people will work on building open-source FPGA toolchains as
> > a result of the talk.
>
>
> that would be good.  bunnie huang explained that with the libre lattice
> ecp5 toolchain he got 5x better utililisation than the proprietary tools.

Ben Widawsky did mention that there were some cases like that, but he
thinks that the libre toolchains generally get slightly worse
utilization.
>
> of course, FPGA companies would make less money if everyone was buying
> smaller FPGAs...

Yes. they'd make even less if they didn't have vendor lock-in (or so
they'd fear).

Jacob