BIO – The Bao I/O Co-Processor(crowdsupply.com)
crowdsupply.com
BIO – The Bao I/O Co-Processor
https://www.crowdsupply.com/baochip/dabao/updates/bio-the-bao-i-o-co-processor
25 comments
How did we go from ho-hum status quo to burn it all down in the US? Especially when the ho-hum status quo was pretty great for the people in power?
You elected trump. Twice...
Because billionaires spent enormous amounts of money supporting him. Trump would not be president without Fox News.
And not without sloppy marksmanship, russia, the systematic destruction of education and a hundred other reasons. But in the end people actually had to go out and vote for him and that's the part that I have a problem with.
You're acting like every US president sans Martin van Buren hasn't been related / a descendant of King John Lackland of England.
Are you sure you're not also a descendant?
Always getting downvoted for typing the inconvenient truth people don't want to read and or acknowledge. This website is just as bad as reddit in terms of enabling censoring of opinions that don't support the popular narrative (like America being a democratic nation where the people elect the president).
Large scale failure of the status quo for the common man. Between free trade agreements, de-industrialization, recurring perpetual wars, and failed social policies that punish working class people. People no longer believed in the status quo.
The status quo wasn't great for the ordinary people and the only offramp they had was clown world. Brexit should have been a hard lesson proving the people will vote against their own interest if they believe they are also voting for something harmful to the regime they despise.
People weren't voting against their own interest. They are voting against a system which they do not believe worked for them. Saying people vote against their own interest is saying that they aught to just shut up and listen. If you propose policy X and say it will be good for people, and they vote against X, then that is a moment of self-reflection on why people think X is not good for them. That attitude is exactly why people despise the regime above them.
A lot of people vote for vibes, not policies. The mistake is in not giving them the vibe they are asking for.
We elected a narcissistic millionaire who bankrupted every company he was ever in charge of. His primary concern while in office was becoming a billionaire, rewarding the Russians that bailed him out of several of those bankruptcies, and trying to punish anyone he felt wronged him.
When the goal is to burn it down and you put people in charge who actively want to burn it down, they can. See: project 2025.
When the goal is to burn it down and you put people in charge who actively want to burn it down, they can. See: project 2025.
Bunnie also wrote up a post about it on his blog:
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2026/bio-the-bao-i-o-copr...
I think that might be literally the same text.
(Barring the first paragraph anyway).
(Barring the first paragraph anyway).
PIOs might be heavier on hardware resources
>The BIO uses 14597 cells, while the PIO uses 39087 cells
and BIO might reach higher clock speeds
> when ported to an ASIC flow, the clock rate achieved by the BIO is over 4x that of a PIO implemented in the same process node.
but BIO is ~15x less efficient per clock. RP2350 is capable of reading IOs at 400Mbps (https://github.com/gusmanb/logicanalyzer) and bitbanging at 800 Mbps (HSTX). From Bunnie writeup BIO needs 700MHz to do pedestrian 25Mhz SPI.
>The BIO uses 14597 cells, while the PIO uses 39087 cells
and BIO might reach higher clock speeds
> when ported to an ASIC flow, the clock rate achieved by the BIO is over 4x that of a PIO implemented in the same process node.
but BIO is ~15x less efficient per clock. RP2350 is capable of reading IOs at 400Mbps (https://github.com/gusmanb/logicanalyzer) and bitbanging at 800 Mbps (HSTX). From Bunnie writeup BIO needs 700MHz to do pedestrian 25Mhz SPI.
Really glad to get this write-up, adds a very nice broad picture & does a good job introducing the queue too.
I'm an unranked unwashed neophyte at hardware design, but I did spend some time looking at BIO. One particular thing that caught my eye a while ago was Streaming Semantic Registers, which is an instruction set extension for risc-v where load and store are implicit, with data pointers that automatically walk on each instruction. This greatly increases code density, allowing for DSP like capabilities on risc-v. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08356
I forget how exactly I was convinced, but after spending a while chatting with the LLM, I became somewhat convinced that the FIFO queues here gave a lot of similar capabilities. With additional interesting use for decoupling multiple systems. Register mapped data arrays, that can be used without having to load/store each word. I felt then and felt now that I still have a good bit to learn about how exactly each of the FIFO registers works, but it was cool to see, and I love this idea of code that can run without having to issue endless load/stores all the time.
I'm an unranked unwashed neophyte at hardware design, but I did spend some time looking at BIO. One particular thing that caught my eye a while ago was Streaming Semantic Registers, which is an instruction set extension for risc-v where load and store are implicit, with data pointers that automatically walk on each instruction. This greatly increases code density, allowing for DSP like capabilities on risc-v. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08356
I forget how exactly I was convinced, but after spending a while chatting with the LLM, I became somewhat convinced that the FIFO queues here gave a lot of similar capabilities. With additional interesting use for decoupling multiple systems. Register mapped data arrays, that can be used without having to load/store each word. I felt then and felt now that I still have a good bit to learn about how exactly each of the FIFO registers works, but it was cool to see, and I love this idea of code that can run without having to issue endless load/stores all the time.
It's a very nice write-up, but this part makes me uneasy:
> So long as all the computation in the loop finishes before the next quantum, the timing requirements [...] are met.
Seems like we are back to cycle counting then? but instead of having just 32 1-IPC instructions, we have up to 4K instructions with various latency, and there is C compiler too, so even if you had enough cycles in budget now, the things might break when compiler is upgraded.
I am wondering if the original PIO approach was still salvageable if the binary compatibility is not a goal. Because while co-processors are useful, people did some amazing things with PIO, like fully software DVI.
> So long as all the computation in the loop finishes before the next quantum, the timing requirements [...] are met.
Seems like we are back to cycle counting then? but instead of having just 32 1-IPC instructions, we have up to 4K instructions with various latency, and there is C compiler too, so even if you had enough cycles in budget now, the things might break when compiler is upgraded.
I am wondering if the original PIO approach was still salvageable if the binary compatibility is not a goal. Because while co-processors are useful, people did some amazing things with PIO, like fully software DVI.
The previous sentence already answers this:
> Here, we leverage the “quantum” feature to get exact pulse timings without resorting to cycle-counting
This is just a hard-real-time constraint that already exists in today’s computers and other devices.
For example: Audio playback and processing are a day-to-day operations where hard-real-time guarantees are necessary for uninterrupted playback, and every digital audio device already conforms to it. If the buffer is too slow you get playback errors.
> Here, we leverage the “quantum” feature to get exact pulse timings without resorting to cycle-counting
This is just a hard-real-time constraint that already exists in today’s computers and other devices.
For example: Audio playback and processing are a day-to-day operations where hard-real-time guarantees are necessary for uninterrupted playback, and every digital audio device already conforms to it. If the buffer is too slow you get playback errors.
It's easier because you don't need a precise cycle count, just a worst-case threshold.
At this level, yes, you are always cycle counting just to make sure you can make your guarantees.
Disclaimer – I am not a compilers person:
Could some from of static analysis determine whether the time between two wait-until-quantum calls exceeds a clock cycle (given assumptions)?
Could some from of static analysis determine whether the time between two wait-until-quantum calls exceeds a clock cycle (given assumptions)?
Yah, it is - the text is first posted to the campaign, and then copied to my blog for long-term archival in a domain that I control, sans the sales pitch.
$20 shipped to the U.S.; ~300 left and probably going fast.
""" Risks & Challenges Global instability is the most significant risk to delivery. The design itself is vetted and working, and the supply chain is set up to pump out chips - just need to know how many to build. The following outcomes could greatly impact the timing of delivery:
* A world war, or a conflict in the East Asia region.
* Additional sanctions or tariffs on components originating from our suppliers.
* AI driving shortages in the supply chain. In particular, chip probe time is scarce; if AI providers preemptively buy out chip probe capacity, it could delay production schedules for months, even years.
* Natural disasters such as earthquakes hitting the fab cluster in Hsinchu
* A civil war in the United States would lead to unpredictable consequences in the supply chain
* A collapse of the US dollar between now and fulfillment would reduce the value of the funds raised, and thus make us unable to pay vendors and fulfill our obligations. In this case we would do a best-effort to fulfill the campaign but a devaluation event of greater than 25% on the USD within the intervening months would likely impact our ability to fill orders. """