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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: 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.