[Oberon] Project Oberon, RISC-V Edition

[Andreas Pirklbauer]

Hi Paul,


    > I've been keeping my eye on this eventuality for RISC-V for a long
    > time and it hasn't happened yet. And a board should be chosen,
    > of course, that is also hopefully not deprecated immediately after
    > the porting effort is over. :(

I’ve been burned with that already :( Ordered a few of the early
crowd-funded RISC-V boards that came out some time ago,
only to see them disappear from the landscape rather quickly.
Also, they were of poor quality.

The issue in this early grass root phase of the RISC-V movement
is, of course, that if there is not enough demand for *a* particular
board, then the creators don’t have any incentives to continue the
effort, as funding also dries up quickly. In a way, crowd funding is
not suited for this, but if a “real" investor invests “real” money
in a project, it stands a greater chance of survivial. It’s
beginning to happen now, but I haven’t found a board
yet that meets all the required criteria.

So this is where we are currently in this space... But I suppose (and
hope) that one day we’ll have the equivalent of what you had with
Spartan 3 board from Digilent in its day - i.e. a “suitable”
board, with just the right amount of memory and 
peripherals, *and* which is not deprecated immediately.

Time will tell!

And there is always the FPGA route to consider.

-ap