*edit, Crowdsupply does a full block on multiple VPN providers. There is no way to access their site without turning off your VPN.
> few individuals relying on snake oil security
Please don't.
I'm not saying it's totally unrelated, only that there do have a dedicated non technical but legal check.
Adding your CPU to another company's silicon is a genius move, well done. I wonder why companies don't sell their spare die space to others, is it because of trust/risk?
The powers that be here think they've found a bunch of "hacks" to curb off low quality comments.
What kind of order of magnitude of cost are we talking about?
What are the next steps - is there some service to cut the wafer and put into a package for you?
After coming out of the fab, the chips go through probing, packaging and reeling.
Ah, another reason why hardware erratas get fixed so rarely (I assume - along with retesting of course).
I had a lot of trouble finding out which open source license applies. Wikipedia’s RISC-V page doesn’t seem to say; its citation for being released under open source doesn’t seem to say which one either.[0] Could be wrong. Exhausted after working all day. But it’s not front and center…
On the RISC-V site I thought it might be more prominent too but if it is I missed it. I found some docs there licensed Creative Commons. Is that the license for the entire CPU? Even layouts and everything that is past the ISA to actual silicon?
[0] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/188405-risc-rides-agai...
Thanks man!
Hand it to someone who does know what to do with it. It's not as important who initially gets the source so much as having it available when it is needed.
Is there a way to bootstrap binary code into the reram? I’m thinking being able to ‘hand-type’ in a few hundred byte kernel rather than use a flashing tool
What would be good is to be able to program the eeprom with hardware, boot the bao with the eeprom and then bootstrap the rest of the OS.
Lastly I was thinking on the inclusion of 4 bidirectional (transputer) links so to speak. I’m guessing you’ve thought about clusters of these chips?
Thanks
Is it big Bao? Or take-away (just learnt the second meaning), or something else?
"dabao" is just a pun on that - means "take-away" or "to-go". The dabao evaluation board is basically a baochip in a "to-go" package.
Good on the author for calling out how nuts this is! In the age of LLM coding agents, I feel this mentality needs to change quickly. Security through obscurity is dead. LLMs have little to no issues conversing in encoded or obfuscated data.
Thank you Bunnie.
The traditional defense against this kind of invasive attack is to put a grid of sense wires on the outermost metal layer, and measuring whether it has been tampered with: you can't get to the important bits without cutting through the security grid, but any kind of modification to the security grid triggers a self-destruct.
I'm also curious about the current draw, but I couldn't find anything?
Current draw - depends on the operating mode, etc. A dabao board with all its regulators and overhead draws around 30mA @ 5V. The CPU in "WFI sleep" (clocked stopped, instant wake-up, all memory preserved) will draw about 12mA @ 0.85V. There's a "deep sleep" mode that requires an effective reboot (clock stopped, no memory preserved) to come out of where it's down to under 1mA @ 0.7V. These latter low power modes require an external power management architecture that can vary the voltage of the core so you can achieve lower leakage states.
I think comparatively speaking, the Baochip doesn't have strong low power numbers. I have always imagined it as more of a chip that gets stuck into a USB device, so it's plugged into a host with a fairly ample power reserve, and not a coin cell battery.
Big fan of this project by the way.
Edit: give Stallman's "Right to Read" another read.
