BlackParrot aims to be the default open-source, Linux-capable, cache-coherent, RV64GC multicore used by the world. Although originally developed by the University of Washington and Boston University, BlackParrot strives to be community-driven and infrastructure agnostic, a core which is Pareto optimal in terms of power, performance, area and complexity. In order to ensure BlackParrot is easy to use, integrate, modify and trust, development is guided by three core principles: Be Tiny, Be Modular, and Be Friendly. Development efforts have prioritized ease of use and silicon validation as first order design metrics, so that users can quickly get started and trust that their results will be representative of state-of-the-art ASIC designs. BlackParrot is ideal as the basis for a lightweight accelerator host, a standalone Linux core, or as a hardware research platform.
The BlackParrot Manifesto
- Be TINY
- When deliberating between two options, consider the one with least hardware cost/complexity.
- Be Modular
- Prevent tight coupling between modules by designing latency insenstive interfaces.
- Be Friendly
- Combat NIH, welcome external contributions and strive for infrastructure agnosticism.
Project Status
BlackParrot v 1.0 was released in March 2020 and has been up and quad core silicon has been running in the lab since April 2020. It supports configurations scaling up to a 16-core cache coherent multicore, including the baseline user and privilege mode functionality to run Linux. An optimized single core variant of BlackParrot (also Linux-capable) is also available. Currently, the core supports RV64IMAFD, with C support on the way!
Development of BlackParrot continues, and we are very excited about what we are releasing next!
A 12nm BlackParrot multicore chip was taped out in July 2019.
You can download BlackParrot here
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