swetland

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
649
Submissions
129
Member since
Apr 5
Writes the Codes.

https://github.com/swetland

https://chaos.social/@swetland/

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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago
I create value the same way I always have.

Meanwhile people are creating garbage with "ai" tools. I wish them the best of luck with their shit.

Comment · 5 months ago
Fuck off. No, I'm not using it. No, I'm not enjoying it.

The only thing performative around here is all you assholes evangelizing this worthless shit.

Comment · 5 months ago
It's useful indicator in these days of useless slop coded shit. Few things are a bigger waste of my time than reading about someone's proudly "ai"-generated pile of garbage.
Comment · 5 months ago
Actually it's quite useful information. As soon as I see another useless "ai coded" project I immediately stop reading/caring about it. Fuck your slop code. Nobody wants that shit.
Comment · 7 months ago
There is no way this utter pile of slop was written by a human.
Comment · 1 year ago
Don't suppose there's actually documentation for the CPU anywhere? (I mean more than a tiny "datasheet" with a very high level overview and/or a pile of random Linux/uboot patches)
Comment · 2 years ago
Lots of nice improvements here. The RISC-V RV32I option is nice -- so many RV32 MCUs have absurdly tiny amounts of SRAM and very limited peripherals. The Cortex M33s are a biiig upgrade from the M0+s in the RP2040. Real atomic operations. An FPU. I'm exited.
Comment · 2 years ago
They actually let you choose one Cortex-M33 and one RISC-V RV32 as an option (probably not going to be a very common use case) and support atomic instructions from both cores.
Comment · 2 years ago
That's the expected clock rate for the TT07 run... but Tiny Tapeout designs only have 8 in, 8 out, and 8 bidirectional IOs (plus a reset and clock input) available, so they're using a multiplexing strategy where the Z80 clock runs at 1/4 of the base clock rate and alternates between control signals, A0-A7, control signals, and A8-A15 on the OUT pins:

https://github.com/rejunity/z80-open-silicon/blob/68438f0019...

So you'd get an effective 12.5MHz Z80 clock and need a bit of external logic to demultiplex the full IO interface. Still not too shabby!

The goal (per the project README) appears to be to prototype with TT07 and then look into taping out standalone with ChipIgnite in QFN44 and DIP40 packages (which would be able to have the full traditional Z80 bus interface and run at the full clock rate).

Comment · 2 years ago
Yeah, the whole "what could we do with the original CPU and PPU of the NES given much more RAM and game data storage" experiment is pretty neat -- and based on what they've shown so far the results are quite impressive.
Comment · 2 years ago
I had moved on from Android by 2013, so I definitely don't have much insight into what it's become over the past decade. In the earlier years it was very much about working hard to build the platform, products, and ecosystem. The team was pretty small and generally isolated from the rest of the company, which was both good (we got to focus on doing our thing and not get distracted) and bad (integrating with Google properties, services, etc was often rather painful).

Part of the reason I left the team was Clockwork (before it became Wear) turning into "just cram Android on to a watch", which was very much not an approach I was excited about and things getting more political and "too big to fail", combined with burnout and needing a change of scenery.

Comment · 2 years ago
The whole "throw everything in the trash and start over" thing is massively overstated. The iPhone announcement absolutely impacted things, not entirely all bad -- there was interest from OEMs before that, but it went through the roof after -- and it did mean we moved from the plan to ship a blackberry-style device first followed by a touchscreen device to skipping right to touch for initial launch, recognizing that the landscape had absolutely changed.

Initial work on the touchscreen based hardware started back in June 2006 (I remember meeting with HTC during a monsoon to kick off the project that became Dream/G1) and OS work to support larger displays, touch input, etc was underway before iPhone was announced.

Blackberry was not really the concern early on... Windows Mobile was. Folks (correctly as it turned out) believed mobile was going to be the next big platform area and there was concern (from Google, but also from OEMs, cellular carriers, etc) that Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience.

Comment · 2 years ago
Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship.

I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.

Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.

No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.

Comment · 3 years ago
Oh I don't even mean the FPGA side (of course that'd be nice), just the SoC's CPU complex and its peripherals! The only "documentation" I've found is a high level block diagram.
Comment · 3 years ago
Not finding any documentation for this SoC on either the beagleboard or microchip websites. I'm still waiting for a RISC-V SoC that actually has reasonable documentation instead of a pile of random linux kernel and (maybe) bootloader patches. A list of base addresses for peripherals and a block diagram does not count.

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