SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Tuesday January 23 2018, @11:48PM (11 children)
Disagree. The kind of folks who will buy/use an open source CPU are the kind of folks who run Linux, and it's not all that hard to port Linux to a new CPU. I know, I got Linux running on an SH-4 back in '00 or '01.
All it takes is a couple people to get it all running, make it an official supported hardware, and you're 99% of the way to a completely working Linux system.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:20AM (10 children)
So, basically people who run servers and a relative few outliers. Desktop shares: [statista.com]
Those numbers are slightly rounded, see referenced page for specifics.
You see how Windows dominates? That's all about apps.
Windows will RunYour(Windows)Shit™, almost no matter when you put your shit on your system. I can run all the Windows95 apps I own (that were built 22 years ago) on the latest WindowsHotness™ and they can still crank right along just fine with a few OS nudges here and there.
OSX keeps breaking its ability to RunYour(OSX)Shit™, and plus, won't RunYour(Windows)Shit without a VM (although interestingly enough, it will somewhat RunYour(Linux)Shit™.) Bang... market share is comparatively tiny. Even though OSX has Easy™ pretty much down.
Linux won't RunYour(Windows|OSX)Shit™ either, and it's generally understood to be HardToUse™, as in, not Easy™, so the Year of the Linux Desktop never happens, desktop market share remains comparatively tiny, only worse, because linux is (perhaps unfairly these days) perceived as not Easy™, so people who ThinkDifferent but want Easy™ tend to go for OSX, not Linux.
It's all very well to rhapsodize about the TechnicalMerits™ of YourFavoriteOS™ but really, most people don't give a Shit™. They want:
You can't meet those targets, you don't have much. Sad, perhaps even depressing, but true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @01:09AM (1 child)
Not that it matters, but at my kids' elementary school and high school they have iPads and Windows laptops and classes on Microsoft Office.
Is it any wonder Microsoft and Apple continue to own most of computing? Android sucks in terms of openness, but it's a miracle it was able to establish a foothold.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:42PM
That's an abomination. Surely at least some parents made their voices heard by saying they didn't want schools pushing non-free proprietary user-subjugating software on their children. Surely at least some people stood up to defend education, freedom, and independence.
I would immediately pull my kid out of such a school. I'd rather homeschool or unschool than subject them to that kind of abuse, as well as all the other forms of abuse that our school system inflicts upon children (like not providing them with any actual education beyond the absolute basics). But surely there is no way for kids to get any socialization outside of the prison-like environment that is school, or at least that's what I occasionally hear.
Besides that, I question the value of having computers everywhere in the first place, whether they respect users' freedoms or not. If your entire idea of schooling is about rote memorization and one-size-fits-all tactics, then giving everyone computers isn't going to help one bit. Even the top schools are junk; they just appear better in comparison, which tempts people to make the 'not as bad as' fallacy.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:32AM (1 child)
Both GNU/Linux (on x86 or x86-64) will run some of your Windows shit using Wine, which is lighter weight than a full VM. But neither Windows nor Linux will run your macOS shit, particularly Xcode for porting your Android shit to the only western mobile operating system whose users actually buy shit.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:30AM
Actually there's a project that's basically Wine-For-OSX called Darling. Sadly it's no emulating Quartz (graphical stuff) yet, but it's apparently able to run most command line tools.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:15PM (2 children)
I don't think Desktop shares tell the whole story.
First of all, servers are BIG business. The number of servers running Linux might already rival desktop cpus at this point.
But consider all of the other types of things that run Linux. Smart TVs. TiVo's. RoKu's. Amazon Fire Sticks. Echos. Google Home. And 2+ BILLION smart phones. GPS navigator devices. Printers (and just about anything else) that has a Web configuration interface. Large routers. Home routers. Wristwatches. Mainframes. And more.
IMO it is highly likely that Windows Boxes are way outnumbered by processors of any stripe running Linux.
So which OS is more important? And what kind of market could new chips find even if only the Linux OS runs on them? Ask ARM. I wonder if there might already be more ARM chips in use than Intel chips. I don't know. But I seriously wonder.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:33AM (1 child)
They do for consumer acceptance. That's why you're not going to get these into the consumer space unless they're so fabulous they can emulate the old stuff at equivalent speed.
The usual run of desktop computer consumers — and there are a huge number of them — by and large, don't care about servers, processors in their TVs or phones, or Raspberry pis. They care about Office, Photoshop, Autocad, Excel, games, and so on. Either you run that stuff like it was your best friend, or you're dead in the water for the desktop and the likes of Intel and AMD will keep on keeping on owning that space.
The vertical markets you're talking about exist apart from any issues with getting an open CPU to actually replace the current crop of closed CPUs.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:33PM
If you read the list of things I mentioned (TiVo's, Smart TVs, Smartphones, etc), I would dare say that qualifies as the consumer space.
I don't think of those as vertical markets. Consumer products that sell in the tens, or hundreds of millions let alone billions are not exactly what I would call vertical markets. By that definition I could say Windows 10 is a vertical market and we know that is not true.
I consider vertical markets as something that is (1) highly specialized, AND (2) has a small but loyal market share. The consumer products I mentioned (Smart TVs) might fit #1 (and I don't think they do), but definitely don't fit #2. Vertical market would be specialized software for a lawyer's office, or doctors office, or your local library, or the place that changes your oil. A limited market and highly specialized.
I think you're talking more about fashion and popularity contest. I'm talking about making big money by selling (or licensing) billions and billions of chips running Linux. And boards with these chips. And support chips. And the programming that goes into these devices.
A few years back, and I don't have a link handy, I saw a graph showing how the sheer numbers of Android (not including iPhone!) devices would exceed the number of Windows PCs and Laptops in a few years (which is now past).
While I understand the attachment to the way things were with Microsoft's monopoly PCs and concern about squeezing every last drop of performance, I think the world has changed and is changing. Windows PCs just don't have the importance they once had. You mention consumer acceptance, most consumers can do everything they need to do daily with nothing more than a web browser, eg, a Chromebook. Not all. But a surprisingly large number. Not everyone needs photoshop. Or they can use some web based dumbed down app. And the state of things today is not the end state. Amazing things are being done within the browser already that suggest that one possible future is that the "browser" might be the replacement for Windows in the future for all types of consumer apps -- even apps like Photoshop.
With Microsoft no longer having quite the power and dominance it once had, we've seen a number of changes at Microsoft. It should be quite informative that Microsoft has embraced ARM processors for pragmatic reasons. That Microsoft has opened up .NET considerably more. That Microsoft has offered both SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio on Linux, what is the world coming to! That Microsoft offers Office on other platforms such as Android and Chromebooks. (Never mind the technical implementation, but consider it from the 'perception' of consumers.) That Microsoft has Windows Subsystem for Linux, and openly admitted that the reason was 'to draw developers back to Microsoft'. That is quite telling. The reason I say all this is that is to reinforce that the importance of getting Microsoft Windows to run on a new chip simply may not be quite as important as you think it is. Important yes. But not the major factor.
I think there is a very bright future for new chip architectures. Despite the tarpit of Microsoft Windows. I would point out ARM as a huge success story. There is very probably more ARM processors than Intel processors in every day use. And that gap will only widen as ARM processors move into data centers. It's not that new processor architectures will need to adapt to Windows. It's the other way around. Microsoft will be forced into adopting to the newer generations of hardware -- IN THE LONG RUN. Not overnight. But in the long run. And it already has happened with ARM. It was unthinkable ten years ago that Microsoft would offer an ARM version of Windows. But here we are.
The Intel architecture is a dinosaur with 4+ decades of baggage. With all the variants, an immensely complex instruction set.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:07PM (2 children)
Try getting Civilization II to run on your new hotness and tell me how that goes. Please do share as that's the best Civ. of them all and I would really like it to run on my Win10 machine. Windows is highly compatible with older stuff, but they aren't 100% compatible. I would love it, if Microsoft would come out with officially supported means to run older programs on modern OS / Hardware. As it is we are left with hacks / workarounds by various people wanting to run X thing on the new hotness. Either that or things like DOSBox, FreeDOS, and ReactOS that try to create an environment to run your old Microsoft programs.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:34AM (1 child)
Have you tried a VM with the OS that Civ II wants running in it?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:50PM
I've tried it in the past with VirtualBox, but ran into some sort of issue. Also, it's not ideal to need to install another OS with virtual drive space to get the game working. I could probably go this route, but would be nice not have to deal with the issues with getting a VM up and going.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"