AMD MicroBlaze V Processor: A Flexible and Efficient RISC-V Processor

This is confusing unless you remember that AMD bought Xilinx recently, so random new Xilinx products will likely get the AMD name applied on them.

According to a Reddit comment [1], this is the same MicroBlaze RTL with a RISC-V instruction decoder in front of it. This seems crazy from a let&#x27;s-make-the-best-RISCV-core perspective, but that&#x27;s never been Xilinx&#x2F;AMD&#x27;s goal.<p>MicroBlaze has always been a great example of a boring in-order RISC CPU in a boring niche. For an FPGA vendor, soft cores are loss leaders: they sell silicon but don&#x27;t make money on their own. They are also boring technology: they are &quot;integration glue&quot;, and don&#x27;t belong in the portion of the FPGA that drives performance. &quot;Good enough&quot; is good enough.<p>If AMD really is reusing MicroBlaze RTL, then they&#x27;re able to keep their existing firmware (core, FPU, debug, peripherals, etc) and software (HAL, compiler, drivers). These are all highly desirable from the perspective of the vendor, and any users looking for a painless transition to the new MicroBlaze core.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;FPGA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17mdcyt&#x2F;microblaze_goes_riscv&#x2F;k7md4gv&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;FPGA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17mdcyt&#x2F;microblaze_go...</a>

Can anyone comment on how notable this announcement is for RISCV?

I wonder what the use cases of MicroBlaze V are vis a vi, say, SERV <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serv.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;servant.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serv.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;servant.html</a><p>That is, the only advantage MicroBlaze V gives you, besides blessing from the chip manufacturer, is speed. Aren&#x27;t FPGA CPUs usually used to do tasks that aren&#x27;t especially time-sensitive? I mean, that&#x27;s what the FPGA fabric is for, to get high-speed, time-sensitive tasks done (in conjunction with the on-chip I&#x2F;O interfaces).

I’m all for new soft cores. However, do we really need to pollute the name space? Microblaze is already a name of an <i>architecture</i> that somebody might want to Google.<p>Just call it AMDcoreV or some such thing

Does it have a psp or a me equivalent? I&#x27;m sick of shady blackbox cpus with insecure unpatchable mallard.

Is the core itself open source?

would love to get like a soft core overview of all these riscv cores. Like are they open source, what sort of coremark score do they get, how big are they, etc<p>neorv, serv, vexrisc, nios v, microblaze v, etc

Are there any dev kits to tinker with this? How does one get started?

This is the first step. Those are good omens.<p>That said, instead of a 32bits core, I would have prefered a 64bits core, because once I write 64bits RISC-V assembly code paths, I could really re-use them on desktop&#x2F;server&#x2F;embedded.

Think new processors need to have 264&#x2F;265 support so it can be used for many popular different applications, thus making them more popular. Trying to use a pi as a desktop replacement kinda sucks if you watch youtube or want to encode. A nice bonus would be some sort of AI acceleration too.