Peripherals, Performance & Dev Boards
These will be the focus of short term activities, getting useful code meaningfully booting with good I/O. So I expect to have some minimal graphics, storage, input etc. working shortly so I can start testing the OS on the new designs.
For the short term this will mean optimising & extending the hardware/software designs for readily available FPGA boards then working towards a custom FPGA motherboard.
Full OS Support
This will come more gradually but is already underway. The main targets will probably be more stripped-down configurations but I hope to eventually be able to run full operating systems.
For now my OS kernel & C runtime code will be treated as a resource for test components rather than as an immediate boot target (since a simpler OS build would be more suited to some configurations).
Real-Time Reliability
The main target for the current processor design and for simpler builds of the OS will be for timing-sensitive motor control or similar tasks (mostly in the robotics/industrial/embedded field).
Improvements in this regard will move towards having a well tested base “microcontroller” configuration that’s well suited to robotics and that should work on multiple FPGA targets.
Future/Faster Models
There’s not much point developing CPUs if you’re not eventually going to make the fastest CPU ever, so obviously I’m not there yet but I’m actively investigating options for superscalar optimisations and for eventually getting chips manufactured (for now, FPGAs are actually ideal).
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