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Interop relies on a single standard as a benchmark and history tells us that people are incapable of being content with a standard that isn't exactly how they imagined it and would rather fragment and live and die on their own hill than play nice.
I'm just amazed how we have two clipboards when I use Linux. Like we can't decide something so stupidly simple.
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.
"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 able to extend it to mobile and has been driven to give away their OS updates.
In terms of porting, CPU architecture is far less of a problem than you might think. Tiny NeXT managed to make its OS available for four CPU architectures: 68K, i386, SPARC and HP-PA, with apparently PPC and MC88K available in-house. Write Once, Run Anywhere™, all with native binaries, no intermediate layer needed.
And these were processors with different endian-ness, RISC, CISC, sliding register windows, sparse register sets etc.
I don't see how an open processor would any better than a closed one.
I mean, I reasonably trust AMD here. I don't see any reason why they'd lie about it. Plus, everyone in AMD seems super-confident that they're immune to the Meltdown issue due to how they implement speculative cache loads.
But such analysis is purely within AMD's circle of engineers. None of us outside of AMD can verify their claims.
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If one kind of RISC-V chips would become the go-to CPU for small smart appliances, demand could rise enough for a fab to pick up mass production.
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.
There are, and have been a few CPU/MCU upstarts that have actually done shorter runs of silicon, and while they are usually quite well funded, the numbers doesn't seem to be prohibitive at all.
If the need was there for it NOW, fabbing something with existing open ip is quite likely to be 'free money' (or free market share), as the semiconductor industry appears to be entrenched with ip licensing so much that I sincerely doubt that they would be quick to follow suit. If only because any open offering from them would be seen as detrimental to market dominance, and lower the value of ip cross licensing deals.
Unfortunately I don't think the market need is there, and won't be for quite some time. I would love to be wrong though.
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 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.
Do you have any experience how it was to target the home market before PCs and Windows took over it?
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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!
Computers were sold with hardware and software designed to work together and provide a full stack experience.
Not a puzzle of bits-and-pieces.
I don't see how an open processor would any better than a closed one.
In many of the same ways that open software is usually better than closed software. In particular, greater scrutiny of specifications and microcode ought to lead to better quality outcomes. This whole debate feels eerily similar to the emergence of open source software into the public eye, back in the 90s.
Which given the CVE entries per day isn't necessarily true, in spite of pull requests being reviewed.
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.
> 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…
I don't see how an open processor would any better than a closed one.
Today we can't know or analyse the security properties of the silicon that essentially runs the entire world. We simply have to trust the producers, and they have been proven to be unreliable at best. They compete on performance and features, and the result is not that different from when there were no safety regulations (and testing) for cars, except that so far bad processor security haven't killed as many people as far as we know.
Open IP is one way to help making sure the above stays true. There are certainly other avenues, but for security it seems to be the case that it's best handled in the open.