Claire Xen  🏳️‍⚧️ 🏳️‍🌈 🧙🏻‍♀️ BLM  🏴 🚩

After Meltdown and Spectre, giant 6502 processors don't seem so silly now, do they?

How about a giant RISC-V implementation? Curious how complicated a PICORV32 out of transistors would be. :D CC @oe1cxw On serious note this is another proof that openness, peer review and formal verification of the silicon that runs our lives is important

To address your curiosity: I just naively mapped a small PicoRV32 config to NOT (2T), NAND (4T), NOR (4T), and DFF (12T) with Yosys. Looks like it would be approximately 77000 transistors with CMOS gates.

That would be 40.5 hours just placing the discrete transistors on my PNP. Sounds like fun. Alternative would be going one up and using nand gates or so :) I know it is not the same…

To give you some reference ARM6 was in the low 20k transistor range, ARM 7 the high 20k transistor range if I recall correctly. Can't recall the 68k transistor count now. Full custom design flow of course, not standard cell.