Is it time for open processors? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#231

Post by tathougies » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 6:15 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #62

tathougies wrote: post #9

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.

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.

C++ is fairly straightforward to port across architectures, especially since most architectures today are going to be 64-bit or more.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#232

Post by tjoff » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 3:06 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #217

tjoff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you consider core count desktop CPUs have had massive increases in performance in the last year and will get another massive increase when 7nm arrives.

This seems to only reinforce my point?

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#233

Post by mcny » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 4:57 PM UTC

mkl wrote: post #105

mcny wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just amazed how we have two clipboards when I use Linux. Like we can't decide something so stupidly simple.

The two different clipboards are fantastic! Select then middle click is one of the things I miss most on Windows, and it's really convenient that that preserves the copy-paste clipboard.

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/

I am so glad to hear they are fixing this in wayland and there will be only one clipboard by default going forward.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#234

Post by deepnotderp » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 1:09 AM UTC

andars wrote: post #121

fmap wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problems have more to do with economics. Creating new modern CPUs requires a lot of capital investment, making CPU vendors more risk averse. That's why modern CPUs by and large are not built to meet the demands of future software - they're built to meet the demands of Excel 97 (exaggerating slightly for effect). The programming interface of a modern x86 CPU is best thought of as a virtual machine with a J…

> more CPU vendors more risk averse Seeing how Itanium went, their risk aversion seems pretty wise. Itanium seems to satisfy most of your desires with its VLIW/EPIC architecture, which exposes much more to the compiler.

The Itanic really doesn't seem fair as a reason to be un-innovative. It did okay in HPC and Bob Rau's untimely death helped hamper it.

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#235

Post by eeZah7Ux » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 10:16 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #110

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I understand it, the ARM IP license that allows companies to customise the actual cores is very expensive, still requires the resulting customisations to comply with the ARM specification, and relatively few companies have the resources to do so.

Customization != "plenty of poorly designed tweaks".

I was replying to the parent using the word "disaster"

Re: Is it time for open processors?

#236

Post by B-Con » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 12:34 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #57

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…

No the vulnerabilities could not have been found by reading the manual. The researchers had to reverse engineer how branch predictor aliasing works for example. I recommend reading the Google project zero blog post on them - they're easy to follow.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-17/how-a-22-...