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Comment by willis936

2 days ago

It's already happened, people just haven't realized. iCE40-UP5K costs a few bucks, needs minimal support circuitry, and is supported by FOSS toolchains (yosys). Fun packages like the pico-ice bring it all the way down to the entry-level arduino crowd. It just doesn't have the marketing mindshare.

A few times over the past decade I wanted to start with a side project where I design and develop a CPU.

I bought a relatively cheap artic 7 board with 33kLUT and whatnot which I know people have used to implement risc-v implementations on.

But then I always lost my patience on the tooling.

For a side projects these days I need something comfortable. Something that that I can easily switch my context to without having to juggle VMs and installing unfriendly tools and use horrible IDEs