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Wild-ass guess; but I assume there is a lot of overlap in the functionality between the type of cores which would mean only a small amount of extra space is required for the additional RISC-V instruction set support as opposed to having distinct CPU cores.


They're sharing silicon? That's cool if true.


It's very unlikely IMHO. Both the RISC-V and the M33 are very tiny in die area, compared to for example the 512kB RAM, or even compared to a few bond-pads.

Making a single core with two instruction decoders but a shared register file, caches, prediction logic and ALU would make sense for a very high-end application processor type core, but not for these small devices. You would also need an instruction set license from ARM for that, vs just licensing the M33 netlist.


That makes sense, it seems that my guess was wrong, thanks


I highly doubt it. I agree it would be cool if it were true.




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