the year was 2018 which actually now
that I think about it wasn't really that
long ago but things are moving really
fast and it's already time for an update
so earlier this year we did a video
about the first-ever open-source CPU
architecture RISC 5 in collaboration
with psy 5 the makers of the first ever
commercial risk 5 hardware and today
today we get to go deeper so psy five
sponsored our trip down to their
headquarters in San Francisco to see
some early concepts of real Hardware
products that are being built using
their IP all the way from a normal SSD
like what you'd install in your PC or
laptop to a functioning media server and
it might not look like much but buried
under this mess of wires as they're so
often is the RB treasure
[Music]
let's start with risk fives benefits in
a nutshell one it's brand-new which
means that it sheds a lot of the legacy
bloat that a company's traditional
processor architectures making it both
extremely scalable and extremely power
efficient and two it's open source which
means no expensive licensing fees for
the companies that use it in their
products all these comes down to money
doesn't it but it has some problems even
if you had an open-source CPU
architecture and you knew how to build a
CPU unless you're already vc-backed
out the butt and you can scrape together
a minimum order quantity on the order of
hundreds of thousands of chips a foundry
like TSMC or Global Foundries is very
unlikely to even pick up the phone that
is where psy Phibes real plan for the
future comes in so today if you yeah you
like you right there need to build a
custom chip for some reason let's say
you want to build a microcontroller for
a car or a smart thermostat there's a
good chance that you would need to build
an entire team of people that specialize
in chip design and manufacturing looks
expensive but check this out
in the same way that large-scale
computing has largely moved from servers
in a closet under the stairs to the
cloud we're processing power storage and
network speed can be ordered a la carte
sy5 has created the Pizza ordering app
of custom chip development so you jump
on to their website select things like
performance memory size the type of
ports and interfaces that you want and
then as you go it generates a block
diagram for you in real time then you
click build and it goes to a cloud
instance that chugs away generating and
verifying the processor that you defined
then the next day you can download the
Vera log RTL and FPGA images that you
can then program onto a board and you're
ready to rock it's basically self-serve
in stark contrast to working with a
traditional IP provider where you might
have to sign an NDA and hand over some
fat stacks before getting anywhere close
to actually testing your software on
your custom chip now right now sigh five
core designer only works for the CPU but
in the future they'll integrate
third-party intellectual property like
graphics controllers and allow customers
to build an entire SOC through their web
interface and then if they want to take
it a step further they can even have the
chips fabbed and delivered through
sci-fi partnership with TSMC so the demo
room then finally it starts with the
sci-fi of fu 540 the same computer that
was previously running quake in our
office currently it's actually doing
something a little different it's
playing a youtube video here which might
not seem that impressive
but this is more of a software
compatibility demo so the operating
system that's running here is Debian
Linux with no risk 5 special expertise
required in order to use it now it's the
daily update stream so you can expect
frequent updates but if you wanted to
install some random application let's
say Firefox you just apt-get install to
be clear no one at sci-fi is trying to
convince average consumers to run out
and buy one of these boards and run it
at home outside of software from the
package manager very little will run at
this time don't expect to download steam
and start gaming or whatever but the
message here is that compatibility is
improving about 94% of the packages in
the Debian repository support risk 5 and
other flavors of Linux are working as
well including fedora open wrt and open
embedded and performance is improving
too so web browsing yeah it's actually
super slow right now like let's go ahead
and go to our website
[Music]
oh boy but the problem here is that the
engine behind the browser doesn't have a
JavaScript just-in-time compiler so it's
kind of like having a ten-year-old
engine on a brand new car with more
optimization that should get as much as
10 times faster a boat equivalent to an
entry-level quad-core arm a53 which as
some of you probably realize still isn't
an overabundance of performance if only
there was some way to add co-processing
capability to it oh wait there is so
this demo right here comes courtesy of
micro semi a microchip company these
guys build field programmable gate
arrays and FPGAs are expensive but these
things are really cool so basically
they're Hardware chips that you can
program to offload certain workloads to
hardware rather than software allowing
your device to perform a specific task
in this case computer vision really
really quickly so their plan is actually
to take this entire thing here and turn
it into a single SOC that they're
calling polar fire marrying risk fives
real time Linux capabilities to their
programmability
with full cache and memory coherency I'm
gonna challenge this thing let's try a
chair I think can you do a chair Oh
airplane chair whoa still early still
early days but hey person it's got
person confirmed here first - is a real
person hmm and it gets even more modular
the RISC 5 Foundation includes some
really influential members these days
including Nvidia who has one of their NV
DLA deep learning accelerators running
the Yolo you only look once algorithm
for object detection so in a similar
fashion to the last demo we saw it pulls
images from the webcam here pushes them
into the NDB LA's buffers where the
object is detect
then it displays the results on the
monitor it's just a more powerful
example of fundamentally the same idea
and see if it picks up the phone and
this scalability goes down as well so
this is psy fives fe3 10 on a high-five
one board it's an embedded board that is
physically compatible with Arduino but
with about 10 times the performance so
the demo we're looking at here doesn't
look like much but what we're seeing is
that it can work on a computational task
in the background and a real-time one
which is the blinking of these LEDs
right here so there is a performance
penalty to our LED going off exactly on
time interrupting whatever else is going
on but for some applications like
medical for example key tasks need to be
performed right now and actually this
design across the table from upbeat is
targeting the Chinese fitness wearable
industry and is expected to show up in
future devices from Kwami
it integrates a similar III series core
but with extra IP including a CNN or
convolutional neural network and a
graphics accelerator it looks really big
but this is just development starts
right there
now this next station is a little more
relatable for PC enthusiasts we talked
at considerable length recently about
the complexity of pushing SSD
performance up when men flash
performance has gone down in recent
years it requires very high speed
controller chips and psy fives partner
fabu is actually working on what they
hope will be the fastest consumer SSD on
the market with a planned ship date of
q3 2019 so this here is a fabu ASIC with
three sy 5e 51 core IPS so that's their
64-bit high performance embedded core
and those are driving the SSD controller
algorithms that do all of the page
mapping and whatnot and fatter claims
that the sy five-course were one third
of the power and
of competing designs now we couldn't
plug it in to verify any of this it's
still very early stages but here's
something we were able to plug in in
years past this home media server or NAS
device from WD would have had an SOC
based on licensed arm intellectual
property hooked up to its shingled
magnetic recording hard drive and then
handling streaming media over your
network to a device like this laptop
well not today now there are really far
away from talking about performance at
this point but the demo that you're
seeing is running on real risk 5 silicon
with the cost savings that come with it
and they're hopeful that on top of a
cost savings thanks to a greater degree
of control over the hardware they could
create custom instructions that improve
the data path increasing performance day
leaving us with just a couple of
housekeeping items here so one sigh five
had not one but three debugging tool
partners demoing their wares including
IAR Sager and Lauterbach and had a
couple really cool security demos this
secure boot demo checks for a properly
signed Linux image and if everything's
fine it boots normally but if
something's amiss this light goes off
wait for it there it is
bad evil Linux cannot boot Linux
authentication failed now obviously this
is not how it'll actually work in the
real world but it's it's very cute and
then over here we have the hax five
multi zone demo so thus i five processor
is running this motor control a console
and a real-time program that's making
this LED blink and each of them is in
its own bucket so the idea here is that
if the LED blinker were to get attacked
it can't turn around and in turn attack
your motor
control which basically concludes our
portion of today's exercise but you guys
still have a homework assignment and
this is pretty cool
if you've ever even thought that chip
design is kind of cool go to sci-fi site
and fire up their core designer just
give it a try I think you guys might be
impressed at how cool it is even just as
like kind of a fun learning tool to look
at what components there are to a CPU if
you've never really given it any thought
anymore we're gonna have that linked in
the video description so thanks to
sci-fi for sponsoring this video thanks
to you guys for watching it if you guys
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