Gadgetory

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 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 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 disliked it you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join