The study items are listed on the Open Source CPUs post, especially the category description.

I’m planning to finish the current list of processor projects on OpenCores. As the list is long and for most cpu all informations are likely to be present on the OpenCores page I will just add them to the summary table. I will silently discards the one without files, as those are just useless.

I’ve gone through the whole list, there was not much more to say about most CPU, but here are some thought.

ASPIDA sync/async DLX Core

It was long since I didn’t read about some asynchronous design, if your looking for that, it might be good for you 😉

JOP: a Java Optimized Processor

I’m more a C than Java programmer but his could be a nice stuff. Just a though if it is used for a smartphone/tablet it could require a kind of virtualization to run each app in a separate context… Maybe it’s already possible, I’ve not looked into the details.

MIPS: The legal risk.

While reading Yellow Star details I found an interesting letter from MIPS on Yellow Star’s page.
I was telling about my doubts with AVR clones, at least for MIPS this was clear (in 2002), they really did not like the clones at all!
So I guess MIPS is not an option unless they change their politics to win back some ARM market share…

As usual the summary table is there: Open Cpu Study Summary.