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Is it time for open processors?

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Re: Is it time for open processors?

#181

Post by quadrangle »

relate wrote: post #33
slivym wrote: 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.

That would be non-free / non-open to be clear. A copyleft license is non-permissive but is still free/open. Just want to be clear, since some people mistakenly think things like that commercial use requires permissive licensing.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#182

Post by kec »

vanderZwan wrote: post #129
skummetmaelk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you can increase the power consumption of all electronics by 50+% and halve the processing power. And that is optimistic.

Sincere question: how much of that is inherent to FPGA systems, and how much of that is due to them being a niche technology used in contexts where there power consumption is not a big issue, meaning that there has not been a significant drive to reduce power consumption? I mean, it's not like the other types of electronics are inherently energy-efficient either: before it affected battery life people didn't care tha…

It's inherent to how FPGAs work. Logic blocks are necessary but are kind of a heavyweight solution to emulate normal logic (and they'll result in a ton of extra silicon driving leakage up).

Perf/Watt has always been interesting as well, It's a major concern for data centers (worse perf/Watt requires more cooling which drives costs up).

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#183

Post by StreamBright »

dragontamer wrote: post #172
StreamBright wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am suggesting that other engineering disciplines produce much safer products without opensource and open design. How it is achieved is another question. Bridges are not safe because of any government agency but because mechanical engineers design them to be safe.

> Bridges are not safe because of any government agency Building a bridge is one of the most heavily regulated things in the USA. For details, see: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbis.cfm Every single bridge in the USA is documented, listed, inspected and regulated. There's even an entire division of the US Military that helps out: The Army Corps of Engineers. So its multi-agency, multi-department, and even includes…

It seems you are really keen on government regulations. You can regulate as much as you want but if we can't build a safe bridge because we don't know the law of physics than legal considerations are pointless.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#184

Post by _lbaq »

masklinn wrote: post #115
_lbaq wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem have more to do with software, CPU's are just built to meet the demands. Today most software can only scale if you add a faster processor, that has to stop, before that happens, there is not much the processor manufacturer can do, their hands are tied IMO

> I think the problem have more to do with software, CPU's are just built to meet the demands. > Today most software can only scale if you add a faster processor, that has to stop, before that happens, there is not much the processor manufacturer can do, their hands are tied IMO These are not recent developments, chip makers could have opted not to use them and software developers would have done otherwise. The hardw…

There was those who tried, for example Inmos with the Transputer, which was _the_ next big thing for a couple of years in the 80's, but unfortunately it never got any traction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#185

Post by dragontamer »

StreamBright wrote: post #183
dragontamer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bridges are not safe because of any government agency Building a bridge is one of the most heavily regulated things in the USA. For details, see: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbis.cfm Every single bridge in the USA is documented, listed, inspected and regulated. There's even an entire division of the US Military that helps out: The Army Corps of Engineers. So its multi-agency, multi-department, and even includes…

It seems you are really keen on government regulations. You can regulate as much as you want but if we can't build a safe bridge because we don't know the law of physics than legal considerations are pointless.

Yes. Which is why there are government regulations saying "Professional Engineers" (a regulated title btw) must know a certain level of physics before they are allowed to build a bridge.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#186

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #29
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…

ISA fragmentation isn't much a worry for people who only run open source software. Debian is especially good at maintaining ports of tens of thousands of packages for 10 ISAs [1]. [1] https://www.debian.org/ports/

And they still have unofficial ports of 6 other outdated ISAs complete with Debian 9.0 net install ISOs [1].

[1] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#187

Post by Symmetry »

lambda wrote: post #106
simias wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay good money for an open and simpler platform to run my security-critical tasks that don't require top performance. Auditing a modern high-end CPU is probably a huge task even if you have access to the HDL because of how complex they are. A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web, send emails a…

Why give up on performance? IA-64 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64#Architecture ) already exists, with its explicitly parallel instruction set, which leaves branch prediction and speculative execution up to the software. So you can still get many of the performance benefits, but it's under control of the software, giving a lot more flexibility for being able to mitigate or eliminate these kinds of issues. I thin…

If you're looking for relatively high and deterministic performance maybe Project Denver, the descendant of the Transmeta's Efficeon, would be a better choice? Of course the binary translation has tons of potential for introducing bugs but since it has an exposed pipeline the translation software would have an easier time guaranteeing you wouldn't run afoul of Specter. NVidia's incarnation seems about as fast as an A57 which isn't great but isn't peanuts either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#188

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

dirkt wrote: post #160
simias wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay good money for an open and simpler platform to run my security-critical tasks that don't require top performance. Auditing a modern high-end CPU is probably a huge task even if you have access to the HDL because of how complex they are. A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web, send emails a…

Have a look at Risc V [1], in the meantime backed by quite a few biggish companies [2] [1] https://riscv.org/ [2] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/big-tech-players-risc-v-arc...

CrowdSupply has an ardrino-compatible risc-v board you can order very cheaply. [1]

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#189

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

int0x80 wrote: post #148
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…

I really don't think that the speculative execution _implementation_ was in any spec whatsoever. The fact that it did the protection domain check later in the process was not documented by Intel at all for example. Having said that, the implementation was (obviously) available for Intel engineers and they didn't spot the problem in 10+ years. Bugs will happen, especially this kind of bugs that people generally haven'…

Was is a unintentional bug, or was a deliberate design tradeoff favoring performance over security?

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#190

Post by debatem1 »

mickronome wrote: post #24
debatem1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that you can't fab for mass production, it's that development costs are very high to get there. Working on an fpga only gets you so far.

I was under the impression that for process nodes you would reasonably use for small smart appliances the fab cost is too high, and certainly not high enough that nobody would pick up the tab if the gadget makers would start to require open IP for their IoT / smart appliance offerings. There are, and have been a few CPU/MCU upstarts that have actually done shorter runs of silicon, and while they are usually quite wel…

Not sure I follow.

Shuttle service costs for small runs of silicon are, for most people in most situations, tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum. My argument is that if the price dropped to the point where it was competitive with FPGAs at prototype scale (eg, 10 parts might cost $1000 but not $10000) then you would see parts on the market built that way quite quickly. I think the proof for that is the number of low volume commercial parts (HSMs, LTE base stations, etc) which carry FPGAs today. Seems the market has already spoken?

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