Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] target-moxie: Add moxie Marin SoC support

[Anthony Green]

Andreas Färber <address@hidden> writes:

>> The Marin SoC currently runs on two boards: the Nexys3 (Xilinx) and DE-2
>> (Altera).  They are pretty much identical from the software side of
>> things.  Marin currently provides the UART, PIC, 7 segment display and
>> timer devices, as well as various memory controllers.  There's no useful
>> distinction between SoC and board at this time.  I'd like to keep it
>> simple as per my patch rather than try to factor them out prematurely.
>
> I thought I've seen a number of odd embedded systems already, but I'm
> having trouble understanding your combination of SoC and FPGA: Xilinx
> and Altera both have SoCs combining a Cortex-A9 with an FPGA. But your
> reference to Xilinx and Altera boards rather sounds as if Moxie is used
> as a soft-core processor on the FPGA? In that case the term "SoC" would
> be really confusing to me... Can you clarify or aid with some links?

Moxie is an architecture.  MoxieLite is one implementation of that
architecture (non-pipelined, resource-light).  Marin is a kind of SoC -
the combination of the MoxieLite core along with various peripherals and
controllers.

http://github.com/atgreen/moxie-cores

It is similar, in a way, to the Miklymist SoC, which uses an LM32
soft-core (and is supported by qemu).

The Xilinx and Altera parts with Cortex-A9 cores are similar, except
that that Cortex-A9 is an on-chip ASIC, instead of a soft SoC.

AG