El Correo Libre Issue 14

-Stefan Wallentowitz, Director, Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation

The RISC-V Foundation has announced draft Formal Specifications for the open RISC-V instruction set architecture, and is inviting members of the community to submit feedback ahead of the selection of a single specification.

“We are interested in your opinions on how useful you would find each of the approaches represented,” says Rishiyur Nikhil, chair of the ISA Formal Spec Technical Group at the RISC-V Foundation, of the drafts. “To date, these have been developed by various subgroups, each for their own purposes and with their own priorities.

“There are two ways to provide feedback: a short, structured questionnaire (should not take more than a few minutes); if you wish, you can provide more expansive free-form comments using the Issues tab of the GitHub repo.

Azure, the cloud computing division of software giant Microsoft, has released a hardware-implementable compression algorithm aimed at large data sets: Project Zipline.

“Microsoft’s Project Zipline compression algorithm yields dramatically better results, up to 2X high compression ratios versus the commonly used Zlib-L4 64KB model,” says Microsoft’s Kushagra Vaid of his team’s creation. “Enhancements like this can lead to direct customer benefits in the potential for cost savings, for instance, and indirectly, access to petabytes or exabytes of capacity in a cost-effective way could enable new scenarios for our customers.

“We are open sourcing Project Zipline compression algorithms, hardware design specifications, and Verilog source code for register transfer language (RTL) with initial content available today and more coming soon. This contribution will provide collateral for integration into a variety of silicon components (e.g. edge devices, networking, offload accelerators etc.) across the industry for this new high-performance compression standard.

Related posts:

In a previous post I went over how to prioritize features. But one thing that I glanced pretty quickly over, was how to always know, which questions are the most important to answer. To be honest, it…

Society often overlooks and neglects a mother’s mental health during postpartum. That means you and I have probably ignored someone’s difficulties before. Note: I am not a health professional. This…

Both of these gifted writers challenged me to reveal eight songs I’d take if I were stranded on a desert isle. “Message in a Bottle” is, oh, so tempting to throw on my list just so I won’t be stuck…