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From the lowRISC blog:
We are looking for a talented hardware engineer to join the lowRISC team and help make our vision for an open source, secure, and flexible SoC a reality. Apply now!
lowRISC C.I.C. is a not-for-profit company that aims to demonstrate, promote and support the use of open-source hardware. The lowRISC project was established in 2014 with the aim of bringing the benefits of open-source to the hardware world. It is working to do this by producing a high quality, secure, open, and flexible System-on-Chip (SoC) platform. lowRISC C.I.C. also provides hardware and software services to support the growing RISC-V ecosystem. Our expertise includes the LLVM Compiler, hardware security extensions and RISC-V tools, hardware and processor design.
[...] lowRISC is an ambitious project with a small core team, so you will be heavily involved in the project's development direction. This role will involve frequent work with external contributors and collaborators. While much of the work will be at the hardware level the post will offer experience of the full hardware/software stack, higher-level simulation tools and architectural design issues.
Some practical experience of hardware design with a HDL such as Verilog/SystemVerilog is essential, as is a good knowledge of the HW/SW stack. Ideally, candidates will also have experience or demonstrated interest in some of: SoC design, large-scale open source development, hardware or software security, technical documentation, board support package development and driver development. Industrial experience and higher degree levels are valued, but we would be happy to consider an enthusiastic recent graduate with a strong academic record.
Informal enquires should be made to Alex Bradbury asb@lowrisc.org.
takyon (thanks to an AC): lowRISC is a project to create a "fully open-sourced, Linux-capable, system-on-a-chip"; it is based around RISC-V, the "Free and Open RISC Instruction Set Architecture", which is meant to provide an extensible platform that scales from low-level microcontrollers up to highly parallel, high-bandwidth general-purpose supercomputers.
Reduced instruction set computer (RISC).
Previously: RISC-V Projects to Collaborate
LowRISC Announces its 0.4 Milestone Release
SiFive and UltraSoC Partner to Accelerate RISC-V Development Through DesignShare
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:27PM (2 children)
Arm has itself positioned as a replacement for x86 in the mobile environment. Desktop environments had of course the disadvantage that they required Windows support... And Microsoft, until recently, only supported x86. MacOSX was originally also on Power, but left it for x86 as well.
An other architecture would be possible, but you'll need someone willing to invest quite some money up front to get it going. Raspberry PI has done this, to be honest, quite successful. You can run them as a small-scale computer, but power is severely lacking there (including a few other things).
(Score: 2, Disagree) by anotherblackhat on Saturday September 23 2017, @08:28PM (1 child)
I know - It seems like all those x86 smart phones have been completely replaced by Arm, almost as if the x86 was never dominant in the first place.
Seriously, Arm has always been faster, cheaper, and drawn less power than the equivalent x86 CPU.
The only thing x86 has going for it is inertia.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @11:08PM
The atom processors are faster, but generally draw more power.
When it comes to anything beyond tablets/phones, x86 does better on everything, and includes a fairly open-source friendly GPU unlike ARM.