Thanks to a kind tweet from Andrew Back, I was able to virtually cross the Atlantic and view this meeting of the Open Source Hardware User Group (OSHUG):
OSHUG #17 — Practical System-on-Chip
Program your own open source FPGA SoC
http://lanyrd.com/2012/oshug17/
Slides: http://oshug.org/presentations/openrisc-oshug17-final.pdf
In this talk Julius Baxter and Jeremy Bennett present the OpenRISC architecture and OpenRISC Reference Platform SoC (ORPSoC), and show how to take this open source design and get it running on an FPGA board.
The Xilinx ML501 is used to demostrate, but it looks to be very pricey for a hobbyist budget. I did notice on the OpenCores site that there is a 139.00 € FPGA dev board designed for the OpenRISC project called ORSoC:
http://opencores.org/or1k/Ordb2a-ep4ce22
Anyone have any experience with OpenRISC?
Cheers,
Drew