Since we do not have a copyright transfer and most of the code is GPLv3 licensed, no one in this project has the right (nor the intention AFAIK) to close all the source.

This is where the Milkymist project is different - you can implement the SoC on a small, affordable FPGA and still get good performance, in part thanks to dedicated accelerators. By the way, there is also FPGA platforms for OpenSPARC so your estimate is too high, but they're still quite expensive and OpenSPARC runs pretty slowly on them.

The LM32 _is_ a good example of open source CPU; and there's more to open source than GNU. Also, it is simply more technically appropriate here than LEON, OpenRISC and OpenSPARC. There was some confusion about the LM32 license (sparkled among other things by confidentiality notices left in the source files) but Lattice cleaned up most of the mess a few months ago. The Lattice license says: " The Provider grants to You a personal, non-exclusive right to use object code created from the Software or a Derivative Work to physically implement the design in devices such as a programmable logic devices or application specific integrated circuits." So - yes, we can implement it in non-Lattice FPGAs. There is no MMU; some people talked about building one but it did not happen. We are open to switching to OpenRISC should it become as small and fast as LM32.

Maybe you do not care, but in about two months, components of the Milkymist SoC are flying into space - and this means more to the project and to open hardware in general than your negative comment.

The unboxing video, though admittedly not perfect, also has a great deal of more up-to-date demo content in it.

See here: http://www.ohwr.org/attachments/821/sebastien.pdf

No. The Verilog code is there: https://github.com/milkymist/milkymist

There is already GCC, and a experimental/incomplete LLVM.

All OGD does is a dumb VGA framebuffer due to lack of development/skills on the FPGA design. We went a lot further than that.

By the way, I will present the device tomorrow in Amsterdam: http://nimk.nl/eng/calendar/pixxxel-milkymist

I do not make any special effort to sound negative here, but honestly that SoC did not really work on anything. Most of the stuff posted to Opencores is in fact half-finished, buggy projects, and Milkymist SoC does not use any other Opencores stuff than Wishbone (and still, this was because of LM32) for this very reason. Even the OpenRISC GCC/glibc toolchain was crippled with various major problems until recently. The OpenRISC RTL still is, but I can see things moving in the right direction. Maybe Milkymist SoC will integrate OpenRISC at some point, if those technical improvements happen. OpenSPARC and LEON were also considered, but they are very heavy resource-wise.

Ah and yes - the video input is pretty much to make stuff the dancers can play with. We have no good video footage or documentation of this however (which is part of the reasons while it's still "beta").

We considered this option, but OpenSPARC is very resource hungry. It is a good design for a stand alone ASIC microprocessor, but in our case it is better to use a small and resource efficient CPU and leave the bulk of the calculations to dedicated accelerators.