PDP-V

An incarnation of the PDP-11 soul in the physical realm of RISC-V.

PDP-V is under active research and release preparation. Its source repositories, upstream contribution series, publications, research data, and reproducibility artifacts are not yet publicly available. Research and availability status.

What it is

PDP-V is a computer architecture and the experimental apparatus for a falsifiable hypothesis: whether PDP-11 style operand orthogonality, combined with vector-length-agnostic execution, improves the workloads that AI infrastructure actually runs. It defines a whole architecture contract rather than an instruction set alone, covering the unprivileged and privileged architecture, memory and platform contracts, accelerators and conformance, and it carries that contract through to a QEMU machine model, synthesisable RTL, a toolchain and a Linux port.

Licence

PDP-V is developed to be released under the GPL-2.0-only. The logo and the commentary book text are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Everything Packet Five Networks publishes is open source and free for anyone to use.

Availability status All research projects Get in touch