This is wonderful! Also what a fantastic partnership that allowed adding a new CPU to that die. Kudos to them.
I had a lot of trouble finding out which open source license applies. Wikipedia’s RISC-V page doesn’t seem to say; its citation for being released under open source doesn’t seem to say which one either.[0] Could be wrong. Exhausted after working all day. But it’s not front and center…
On the RISC-V site I thought it might be more prominent too but if it is I missed it. I found some docs there licensed Creative Commons. Is that the license for the entire CPU? Even layouts and everything that is past the ISA to actual silicon?
RISC-V is a family of instruction sets (which have various chips implementing them). Think "X86-64".
It looks like the baochip-1x is using the VexRiscv CPU. The HDL is available here under MIT: https://github.com/SpinalHDL/VexRiscv
To clarify - RISC-V is an architecture, and that is an open specification. However, as an architecture it only specifies things like, what the instructions are and their encodings. It doesn't actually give you a CPU that does anything, just an abstraction of how to describe a CPU to a common standard.
Anyone is permitted to implement a RISC-V CPU, which would then involve coding something up in an RTL. The resulting RTL artifact may be open or closed source depending upon the developer's preference. In the case of the Vexriscv, that particular one implementation is MIT licensed. There are other implementations that also have MIT licenses, but because it is up to the core's implementer to pick a license, not all RISC-V cores are open source.
In fact, some of the most commercially successful RISC-V cores are closed source licensed.
I had a lot of trouble finding out which open source license applies. Wikipedia’s RISC-V page doesn’t seem to say; its citation for being released under open source doesn’t seem to say which one either.[0] Could be wrong. Exhausted after working all day. But it’s not front and center…
On the RISC-V site I thought it might be more prominent too but if it is I missed it. I found some docs there licensed Creative Commons. Is that the license for the entire CPU? Even layouts and everything that is past the ISA to actual silicon?
[0] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/188405-risc-rides-agai...