Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

Hello wonderful people! I'm bunnie - just noticed this is on HN. Unfortunately due to timezones I'm about to afk for a bit. I'll check back when I can, and try to answer questions that accumulate here.

To anyone from crowdsupply listening, please turn down your VPN check. I am not stripping my privacy protection to use your site.

*edit, Crowdsupply does a full block on multiple VPN providers. There is no way to access their site without turning off your VPN.

This is wonderful! Also what a fantastic partnership that allowed adding a new CPU to that die. Kudos to them.

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...

bunnie your book "Hacking the XBox" taught me how to get started on reversing electronics, took the fear out of the process, and replaced it with fun. Thanks for the multi-decades long effort you've made to make these tools available and accessible and approachable, your contributions to the hacker community are immeasurable and I cannot say thank you enough.

Thanks man!

> Those with a bit of silicon savvy would note that it’s not cheap to produce such a chip, yet, I have not raised a dollar of venture capital. I’m also not independently wealthy. So how is this possible?

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?

I run a hardware company now (thankfully in the age of AI), as a direct consequence of reading Bunnies book 'hardware hacker'

Thank you Bunnie.

Great work on the chip, I’m really onboard with the trusted computing aim!

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

Cool project. Why is it called the Baochip/Dabao?

Is it big Bao? Or take-away (just learnt the second meaning), or something else?

> What’s a banker going to do with the source code of a chip, anyway?

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.

Why the few closed-source components on the system? You mention the bus, USB PHY etc -- are those things harder to design than the CPU core?

This is about transparency just like the Precursor, right? How can I know that my Baochip-1x is really what it says it is?

Very cool! So there’s 5x riscV cores available?

I didn't know there were partially open source RISC-V. I might have missed it in the article, but what was the reason for having some parts closed source?

It seems it had hardware support for secure mesh. Anyone know what that is?

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