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Is it time for open processors?

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Re: Is it time for open processors?

#61

Post by anfilt »

B-Con wrote: post #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 o…

They had to partly reverse engineer the branch predictor. It was not fully documented...

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#62

Post by IshKebab »

tathougies wrote: post #9
cm2187 wrote: post #5

If we see further fragmentation of cpu architectures it's not going to be fun for users and developers. Already the fragmentation of OS makes that cross platform is a big challenge. It would make the equivalent of a .net/java/webassembly/posix critical.

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.

A lot of code is, but are you really going to ignore C++, Go, Rust, etc? Most games are written in C++, as are most large desktop apps.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#63

Post by mpweiher »

icelancer wrote: post #45
mpweiher wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> further fragmentation of cpu architectures "Fragmentation"?? We have a huge monoculture of Intel x86/x64 on the desktop, driven by Intel's fab advantage that smothered all alternative (and often superior) architectures. And recently, a second one has sprung up with ARM on mobile. And it hasn't really been good for the industry. Fortunately, the Windows monoculture in OSes has been broken, so much that MS wasn't abl…

>often superior This is a little hyperbolic. There have been occasional superior alternatives but "often" is kinda silly. By and large, the best products won - and that is despite accepting that Intel acted in anti-competitive ways in the past (Cyrix et al).

> best products

Agreed, somewhat, but you are conflating "product" and "architecture". I specifically meant architecture.

Intel was usually at least one process generation ahead of competitors, and often more than that. With Moore's law still going at full tilt, that meant not only more transistors, but also faster transistors, completely overwhelming the architectural deficits.

> occasional superior alternatives but "often" is kinda silly

Hmm...just off the top of my head: Motorola 68K, MicroVAX, LSI-11, SPARC, AMD 29K, Power, RISC, MIPS, Transputer, Alpha, HP-PA, ARM for desktop, Motorola 88K, Fairchild Clipper, etc.

I'd be hard-pressed to name an architecture that wasn't superior to i386. But architecture did not matter. With Moore's law no longer also getting us faster transistors, it might matter again: https://rodneybrooks.com/the-end-of-moores-law/

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#64

Post by pjmlp »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #55
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In particular, greater scrutiny of specifications and microcode ought to lead to better quality outcomes. Which given the CVE entries per day isn't necessarily true, in spite of pull requests being reviewed.

No - open source is a specific case of the general rule that there is no such thing as a silver bullet :) But it does make possible a bunch of superior workflows that are impossible with proprietary software, and makes certain types of failure common to propriety software much harder.

I am yet to see any open source project subjected to the same high quality workflows as commercial propriety software targeted for high integrity computing deployment.

Could you provide an example?

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#65

Post by quantummkv »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #59
quantummkv wrote: post #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 J…

Nonsense. OEM can buy ARM "IP" and jam it into a SoC with plenty of poorly designed tweaks and additional devices and it's not happening. Also, open does not mean that random changes are allowed as part of the original design. You can have a license that prevents using the original name of a CPU on modified versions.

Most OEM's do not have the money to buy ARM IP. Those that have money, i.e, Samsung, Huawei and Apple, are doing it. AFAIK open does mean that I can fork and make whatever changes I want to the original design. I cannot use the name, but i can use everything else.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#66

Post by SolarNet »

quantummkv wrote: post #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 J…

This is the purpose of the GPL and copyleft licenses: to create a commons that companies can't exploit in the manner you described. The problem with Android is that the parts that aren't the kernel are not copyleft. This allows vendors to shove stupid stuff in there and not release the code. If a chip spec uses copyleft correctly (e.g. no sacrificing to LGPL style things on the edges) this won't happen.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#67

Post by SolarNet »

Lxr wrote: post #39
quantummkv wrote: post #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 J…

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

It is. The kernel is GPL; the copyleft license protects the commons from exploitation without releasing the source code, which allows people to fix these things. It does happen to Linux userspace though because a lot of that is not copyleft (which is fine, people should decide each component themselves).

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#68

Post by lnsru »

Hardware is whole completely domain as software. Sadly one cannot throw a hardware bug fix to github and expect mass adoption next day. Hardware cycles are way longer and the associated cost (take alone mask set!) is too high. How many users would be capable of reviewing these millions lines verilog code? Integrated circuit openess is an utopia.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#69

Post by cm2187 »

tjoff wrote: post #49
anameaname wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it hasn't really been good for the industry. Intel's problems over the past year aside, they have done an amazing job pushing the limits of computation over the past decades.

Last decade I'm not so sure. I bought the very first readily available consumer quad core CPU a decade ago (the Q6600), two years ago I upgraded and I had to pay a huge premium because I wanted more than four (I got six!) cores. And that is just starting to change today. Not that core count is everything but consumer desktop CPUs have stagnated quite a bit. Here's to hoping AMD stirs it up a bit.

Because the compute power for consumer CPU nowadays is good enough, the effort has been in reducing energy consumption. But if you look at the server / workstation side, you can get 20+ cores in a single dice.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#70

Post by wasx »

quantummkv wrote: post #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 J…

No you're conflating two different issues here. An open architecture with a copyleft license would be resistant to the abuse you just identified. An open architecture that allows closed changes would do what you're saying, and is the major fault of Android.
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