Lowrisc cpu in a notebook?

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tonlee
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Joined: 09/08/2014

Lowrisc http://www.lowrisc.org/ is making a free hardware cpu board about 2 – 5 times the performance of the raspberry pi.
When for sale, will it then be possible to build a 2, 4 or 8 cpu core, what ever it takes, free mainboard with the performance of an intel duo core notebook mainboard, assuming that gpu, wifi, display, etc also are free hardware?

megurineturilli
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Joined: 01/10/2012

it looks like the CPU is really free at the HDL level, while most commercial CPUs do not provide that level of freedom. This looks like an opt-out for non-free microcode that runs on a CPU. In this case we have free microcode that can run on a FPGA, but the tools to create a bistring are nonfree. It is important to write a free software FPGA toolchain, if we really want free freedom at the lowest possible levels of hardware.