neorv32-setups VS vroom

Hello. In my project, I am trying to run NEORV32 processor in an FPGA. My plan is to perform debugging of the design over JTAG after running it on an FPGA. I currently have a Zybo Z7-20 and a Nexyx A7 board at hand. As per my understanding, for both of the boards, I need to find the board pins associated with JTAG and manually connect them through the constraint file. I was going through the reference manuals for both FPGAs but couldn't find the pins that need to be connected.

and by "all" you of course mean some small Cyclones, Lattice ICE40s and Artix7 (see here)

There are some example setups here: https://github.com/stnolting/neorv32-setups

Maybe implement a big feature for a open source design? like vroom or xiangshan.

The two most micro architecturally advanced cores that I know of are BOOM, an out of order RV64GC core with all the features you expect plus sort of weird fancy things like short forward branch predication, and VROOM, another out of order RV64GC core with things like uop fusion and a trace cache.

I had VROOM! in mind (https://github.com/MoonbaseOtago/vroom) because I remembered it aims for 4 IPC avg with a width of 8. Though looking again it's 8 compressed 16 bit instructions or 4 uncompressed 32 bit instruction.

So you could argue a real mix of instructions is not going to be all 16 bit but some 16 and some 32, so the 8 is rarely achieved in practice, and also the block diagram only shows 4 decode blocks. But it can in fact peak at 8 instructions decoded per clock, so I think that qualifies. (You could even argue it's especially impressive, since RISC-V technically qualifies as variable-length encoding like x86, it's just that only 16/32 instructions are really used at the moment)

If you are interested in high performance look into vroom , c910 and xianghan, maybe you could adopt one of them.

On top of what others mentioned (Red Hat) , it is also possible to go with the mysql/mariadb model of dual licensing, you can have a copyleft license where you must contribute back changes, but also allow selling an proprietary license if they want to enhance it but not share the improvements (like amazon or Ampere Computing that enhance ARM designs and sells it for servers), there is already a RISK-V implementation that aims to do that (vroom). another option is a non profit foundation that companies contribute to because they use the project and want it to be better (like the linux foundation) , risc-v has similar nonprofits like the chips alliance (which develops the Rocket-Chip ) or the OpenHW Group (which develops CVA6), there is also lowrisc which develops ibex (but as far as i can tell isn't governed by the contributing companies like the other non profits).

You want a very optimistic answer? someone is working on open source server core, It is already announced and i have been told it is somewhere around four years for a chip to ship after announcement so i would say 4 years from now.

At the moment the Apple M1/M2 are the king of wide decode. Within a couple of years you will see equally wide decode and execute of RISC-V from companies such as Rivos, or indeed open source and GPL'd projects such as VROOM! (https://github.com/MoonbaseOtago/vroom)

> True performance RISCV designs are going to be people's money maker and never open sourced.

That turns out not to be the case.

Alibaba's C910 core -- roughly comparable to the ARM A72 cores (at the same MHz) in the Pi 4 -- is open sourced. It is being used, at 2.5 GHz, in the upcoming "Roma" laptop. That is rather expensive (for now), but I suspect the same TH1520 SoC will quickly find its way onto cheaper SBCs.

There is a very wide OoO GPL'd RISC-V core that is under development. It is aiming for eventual Apple M1 level performance. The current iteration is falling short of that at the moment, but it's already comparable to the ARM A76 in the latest RK3588 SBCs: https://github.com/MoonbaseOtago/vroom

Then you can help open source hardware designs like xiangshan or vroom.