Comment by brucehoult
Comment by brucehoult 3 days ago
SiFive was founded by academics who had successfully taped out a number of processor chips. They subsequently hired many experienced industry CPU designers from Arm, Intel, AMD and others.
> the future of SiFive is unclear
What is that supposed to mean? The future of Intel is unclear. The future of Arm is unclear. The future of Tesla is unclear. The future of Boeing is unclear. That's just life in a highly competitive industry.
> Choosing another language is pretty much impossible, unless you translate it to either SystemVerilog or VHDL.
?? Which of course is exactly what Chisel has always done. Do you even know anything about it?
> If you do that, then it is hard to justify using another language instead of writing directly in SystemVerilog or VHDL.
No it is not.
Chisel enables much more abstraction than Verilog, enabling you to design not just a single CPU core but a family with very different characteristics. Diplomacy simply has no analog in the Verilog world.
Chisel, FIRRTL, CIRCT enable the same kind of optimisations on RTL as GCC or LLVM do for C code. In fact CIRCT is built on LLVM. You can emit Verilog that is optimised for different hardware technologies, including different PDKs, or FPGA vs ASIC, in a way that is completely impossible with Verilog.