Yeah, I know. I didn't expect the goal to be reasonable.
Nothing about the project is really all that reasonable, considering FPGAs are nearly entirely proprietary across the board, and because it'd be super expensive to make something that is actually truly open.
> "Nothing about the project is really all that reasonable, considering FPGAs are nearly entirely proprietary across the board, and because it'd be super expensive to make something that is actually truly open."
The Kestrel-4 plans to use the ICE-40 as one of its platforms, and at the time of writing this the ICE-40 FPGA family is the most open of all FPGA devices (fully open source development toolchain, etc...).
Did you see the specs? He went from a Commodore to a NUMA-scale machine that he will implement on a mix of Xilinx and ICE FPGA's. Not saying he can't do some fraction of it but those are some heavy specs.
After reading it again, you're all quite right, I was wrong, it's an April Fool's joke. Still, the principal of a computer on an ICE FPGA is a good one, even if it's not currently being pursued by this guy.
I'd like to try my hand at building my own iCE40-based motherboard for the Kestrel some day, but something like that would be at least two to three years into the future minimum, especially at my current rate of progress working solo. It's best to not have any expectations.
Nothing about the project is really all that reasonable, considering FPGAs are nearly entirely proprietary across the board, and because it'd be super expensive to make something that is actually truly open.
But good for them for trying something new.