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: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 24 2018, @01:19AM
I can guess from this that you would be likely to choose "only Windows" if you could have only one of these operating systems. Because, you know, apps.
But that's a thing in the culture and the habits and the institutions of the greater Windows environment, which is by far the dominant one.
There are people--fewer in number--who would choose a unixlike OS, and a free one at that, if given the same only-one-OS choice.
And those people have habits and a culture and institutions that mean that for them, a new architecture, a new processor, means *shrug* port and recompile everything, because the source is available for pretty much anything they would want to run. For those difficult-to-port apps, a slightly more inconvenient process of forming a porting team and solving the problems (or waiting for those who do that, to do that).
The nice thing is that those open-unixy-compile-things people are the initial pilgrims on the shores of new architectures, and are the ones that will build infrastructure for the larger "I need my apps to just work" crowd.
It will take a long, long time for mainstream culture to come around to preferring free software, which confers the benefits I've mentioned and others. Fortunately that's not the culture it needs to catch on with first.
She, if she's an average unsophisticated user, will run what you give her, and settle into whichever culture you place her. She isn't in that pilgrim vanguard, no, but then neither are you, and you're a developer!
I am not a developer unless you charitably count complex scripts and websites, but I do have several ARM boards doing real work and I'd welcome the chance to start recompiling things on a free and open processor.