Apollo-11
microwatt
Our great sponsors
Apollo-11 | microwatt | |
---|---|---|
127 | 19 | |
56,371 | 643 | |
- | - | |
4.6 | 6.7 | |
about 1 month ago | 13 days ago | |
Assembly | Verilog | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Apollo-11
- Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) source code
-
Mistral CEO confirms 'leak' of new open source AI model nearing GPT4 performance
I often like to think about https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11 as an analogy. It's public domain with available source, in the assembly language in which it was written... so it fills all the definitions of OSS!
But the process by which that code arose, the ability to modify any line and understand its impact (heh) on a real execution environment, is dependent on a massive process that required billions of dollars and thousands of the smartest people on the planet. For all intents and purposes, without that environment, it is as reliably modifiable as an executable binary in any other context - or a set of weights, in this one!
-
Can a Transformer Represent a Kalman Filter?
But can a Transformer run on the Apollo Guidance Computer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
Frequency 2.048 MHz
Memory 15-bit wordlength + 1-bit parity
2048 words RAM (magnetic-core memory)
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
-
TIL an Oxford University physicist claimed that for the moon landing conspiracy to be true, around 411,000 people would’ve needed to keep it secret. He also suggests the hoax would’ve broken down in 3.68 years.
You can look at the Colossus 2A code written by Margaret Hamilton and her very small team on Github.
- "Temporary" code in Apollo 11's lunar landing guidance equations (1969)
-
SpaceX poised for 'mid-November' launch of second Starship test flight
"Burn Baby Burn" might be even more apt!
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
-
Software Disenchantment
My more positive take on this: our runtime environments are bloated because we have ways to enable trust, stability, and iteration speeds that people wouldn't have dreamed of in years past.
Your Notion desktop app and Google Chrome both support embedding & displaying multimedia content that's controlled by people that you may not trust, but they can draw on decades of engineering to sandbox that content. They can independently be updated without worrying about a centralized `flexbox.dll` that may or may not be the right version. They do not require building a new executable to make the vast majority of UI changes. And the cost is simply storage space and initial download bandwidth.
We can look with rose-colored glasses at an era of "every byte of assembly has been hand-crafted." I, too, look in awe at what was achieved with such things as https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/tree/master/Luminar... . But that software, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#Softw..., took 1400 person-years of work.
We have to compare apples to apples - the abstractions we have today would not prevent such a piece of software from being built, and indeed would allow us to build that exact software, even bit-for-bit the same, much more easily due to abstractions on our tooling itself. We have not departed a world where, given a nation-state budget, one could pay for 1400 person-years of work and create the AGC (though one might make arguments about the distraction levels of modern society, but that's a different thing entirely).
But we also exist in a world where I can build and ship a cross-platform video chat application in an afternoon (well, not counting app store approvals) and be reasonably confident that my app will be compatible with, and secure on, practically any computer or mobile device sold in the past half decade, regardless of how many other apps may have been installed on each device. I'd venture to say that Apollo engineers would, and do, find this aspect of our world fascinating, too.
- NASA's Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters
-
Margaret Hamilton stands next to her handwritten code for the lunar missions
Thankfully it was eventually migrated to GitHub
microwatt
-
Microwatt: A tiny Open POWER ISA softcore written in VHDL 2008
My favorite part of this project is the pretty large battery of test cases. A lot of chip rtl releases don't bother with open sourcing the verification too, and that's arguably more useful than the rtl in the first place.
https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt/tree/master/test...
-
Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses
MicroWatt is the only one I know of.
https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
-
RISC-V Pushes into the Mainstream
I have several OpenPOWER systems, including the POWER9 I use as my usual desktop. Besides IBM and other server manufacturers like Tyan and Wistron, you can get them as Raptor workstations and servers.
If you want an OpenPOWER design to play with, look at Microwatt ( https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt ) which is complete enough to boot Linux.
-
How long until RISC gets adopted for the desktop?
Not true, as of 2019 the power ISA is able to be used without needing to pay any royalties to ibm under the openpower foundation. There's already a few projects that have taken advantage of it such as libreSOC and Microwatt. Source code for various firmware components are also freely available pertaining to the power platform.
-
Build Open Silicon with Google
https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt is an example of a Linux-capable 64-bit core that has been submitted on multiple Open MPW shuttles:
- Any raw binary generic platform-agnostic test roms for PowerPC?
-
What would you think if the Amiga line jumped from PowerPc to RISC-V CPUs?
GitHub https://github.com/openpower-cores https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
-
Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world
At the other end of the scale, if anyone wants to play you can run a little openpower CPU on a FPGA with completely open source. https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
It's capable of running Linux, some example docs are https://shenki.github.io/boot-linux-on-microwatt/
-
What is your take on ISA architectures for FPGAs (x86, arm, risc-v)?
Why dismiss POWER or SPARC ? :-)
What are some alternatives?
DOOM - DOOM Open Source Release
chiselwatt - A tiny POWER Open ISA soft processor written in Chisel
midimonster - Multi-protocol control & translation software (ArtNet, MIDI, OSC, sACN, ...)
WebKit - Home of the WebKit project, the browser engine used by Safari, Mail, App Store and many other applications on macOS, iOS and Linux.
OpenSkyStacker - Multi-platform stacker for deep-sky astrophotography.
Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine
VexRiscvBPluginGenerator
GraphRedex - An interactive semantics explorer
librealsense - Intel® RealSense™ SDK
riscv_vhdl - Portable RISC-V System-on-Chip implementation: RTL, debugger and simulators