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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the open-to-the-possibility dept.

Is it time For open processors? Jonathan Corbet over at lwn.net seems to think so. He lists several ongoing initiatives such as OpenPOWER, OpenSPARC and OpenRISC, but feels that most of the momentum is in the RISC-V architecture right now.

Given the complexity of modern CPUs and the fierceness of the market in which they are sold, it might be surprising to think that they could be developed in an open manner. But there are serious initiatives working in this area; the idea of an open CPU design is not pure fantasy.

[...] Much of the momentum these days, instead, appears to be associated with the RISC-V architecture. This project is primarily focused on the instruction-set architecture (ISA), rather than on specific implementations, but free hardware designs do exist. Western Digital recently announced that it will be using RISC-V processors in its storage products, a decision that could lead to the shipment of RISC-V by the billion. There is a development kit available for those who would like to play with this processor and a number of designs for cores are available.

Unlike OpenRISC, RISC-V is intended to be applicable to a wide range of use cases. The simple RISC architecture should be relatively easy to make fast, it is hoped. Meanwhile, for low-end applications, there is a compressed instruction-stream format intended to reduce both memory and energy needs. The ISA is designed with the ability for specific implementations to add extensions, making experimentation easier and facilitating the addition of hardware acceleration techniques.

[...] RISC-V seems to have quite a bit of commercial support behind it — the RISC-V Foundation has a long list of members. It seems likely that this architecture will continue to progress for some time.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:32PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:32PM (#626810)

    money and other issues aside... yesterday was too late, that's all i have to say.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:44PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:44PM (#626825)

    But yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away.

    • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:50PM

      by looorg (578) on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:50PM (#626831)

      Don't try to Yoko this project to ...

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:17PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:17PM (#627162) Journal

      For a reasonable price your troubles can be relocated closer to you with higher bandwidth and lower latency in how they affect your life.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.