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Is it time for open processors?

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31–40 of 236 posts

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#31
There are just so many issues with this it's almost laughable to be honest.

Firstly, let's assume you basically need a big company to opensource their existing IP because opensource is no where near where Intel is today. So let's look at the obvious choice: Intel has traditionally perceived itself to be a manufacturing company. It tries to produce as many chip widgets as possible and producing CPUs or SSDs or network chips is just their way of finding ways to sell their widgets. The core of their business is fabrication.

Now, the only companies they let use their foundries to produce other chips are almost exclusively companies that they end up buying (I'm looking at you Altera).

By open sourcing their CPU designs they are practically guaranteeing that some of the chips they produce today would be produced by Samsung and TSMC. Try explaining to their share holders that you're giving away the crown jewels, damaging the core of the business and hoping for what....?

Secondly, taping out a chip is hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even if you did opensource everything, the only people who could actually produce the chip would be huge corporations, and the process of taping out isn't "Let's save it to a floppy and send it off". All of the tape out process requires proprietary tools from the fab, which are only available to the serious customers. So your source might be open but no one outside the company would be able to actually read them. And this is non-trivial, TSMC consider their tools to be a core part of the IP that differentiates them, they'll never release them under anything but a very strict contract to a client.

Finally, one of the key benefits to opensource is that you can fix something yourself, you can contribute and change things. Well not in hardware. The best you can manage is to fix the problem in the next $X00k production run.

Laying all that aside: No one has actually described what benefits Open Source software has over closed source that we're trying to map to hardware? To me a key benefit of Open Source is that we don't depend on corporations as gatekeepers to fix things, well that isn't solved in hardware open source.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#32
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all code today is written in languages that run in vms(java, .net), are interpreted (python, ruby, js), or easily compile across cpu architectures. Operating systems are a different story but changing the underlying ISA is really not a huge deal IME it’s harder to port to a new os than a new ISA.

It may be, but from a user point of view, unless the developer targeted that architecture, you are out of luck using that software. And then you end up with “I need software 1 but it only works on OS A and cpu X and I also need software 2 that only runs on OS B and cpu Y”. We are back in the 80s!

Except today we have open source that can be recompiled without the author's explicit approval and we have a large collection of software that runs in some VM or other. There is also a variety of services as a software substitute that run on some cloud.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#33
post #31

There are just so many issues with this it's almost laughable to be honest. Firstly, let's assume you basically need a big company to opensource their existing IP because opensource is no where near where Intel is today. So let's look at the obvious choice: Intel has traditionally perceived itself to be a manufacturing company. It tries to produce as many chip widgets as possible and producing CPUs or SSDs or network…

Could't they open source the design/implementation without a permissive licence? I.e. everyone could audit, but nobody could use it commercially.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#34
The problem is less about openness itself and more about quality of auditing. Open isn't a magic bullet. As I understand, these latest CPU vulnerabilities were in the spec themselves. You could've found them by reading the manual. See what good that did us.

But I posit that open projects do better with audits than closed because they are more likely to have open audits as well, and an open audit is harder to ignore or sweep under the rug if it's inconvenient to business.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#36
Open Processors is a very bad idea. Look at what's happening to Android. The same thing will happen with CPU's. Every OEM will fork the open design and put all of their stupidity inside it in the name of features and security. Bugs like Spectre and Meltdown will become commonplace.

The entire time of kernel devs will be spent working around the various 'features' of the OEM designs. Then someone will come up with a JVM and docker for the CPU and lead to another round of madness.

There is no harm in having alternate architectures. But putting everything up on GitHub is a recipe for disaster.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#37

Open does not mean better. This is not how our world works. Would be nice to have but I assume every Intel chip I can buy (even with the throtteling) will be more powerful and cheaper than any open processors. There is also much more than only architecture this thing (this works in software but not in hardware)... this would only work if a big player like AMD or Intel jumps on this ship (but it would be like giving a…

If one only considers power / speed and cost, then open will certainly mean worse. However a processor with verifiable functionality has value. It's more trustworthy. It can be checked for accidental, or deliberate, security flaws. In many scenarios, I don't care how fast a processor is, if it's leaking data then it's worthless.

For me this is an extreme view. If your security demands are that high I'm sure you will find even nowadays CPUs which are in that level of "trustworthyness" you want. One funny example: You can use a Raspberry Pi which is not affected by Meltdown or Spectre ;) https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulne...

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#39

Open Processors is a very bad idea. Look at what's happening to Android. The same thing will happen with CPU's. Every OEM will fork the open design and put all of their stupidity inside it in the name of features and security. Bugs like Spectre and Meltdown will become commonplace. The entire time of kernel devs will be spent working around the various 'features' of the OEM designs. Then someone will come up with a J…

Why doesn’t this happen with linux, in your opinion? Is it the license?

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#40

Open Processors is a very bad idea. Look at what's happening to Android. The same thing will happen with CPU's. Every OEM will fork the open design and put all of their stupidity inside it in the name of features and security. Bugs like Spectre and Meltdown will become commonplace. The entire time of kernel devs will be spent working around the various 'features' of the OEM designs. Then someone will come up with a J…

There's some FUD there...
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