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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: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:32AM
Sigh. Hardware isn't like software.
You are right. Cutting-edge hardware is not like cutting edge-software. However...
Spinning up a current generation ASIC is expensive, as you rightly point out. Go back a few generations, though, and costs drop. Or use FPGAs, as many already do. There is a cpu upgrade board for Amiga computers [apollo-accelerators.com] that uses a 68000-architecture FPGA that has adequate performance - to run a very old Linux kernel, before too much code bloat happened. Going to an Open Hardware cpu will require setting ones sights considerably lower - you are not going to replace a multi-GHz cpu just yet, but you would have to start somewhere, and re-iterating the last 20-years of cpu development history would be faster the second time around, because most of the work has already been done.
What stops this is lack of mainstream demand - as others have said - applications/apps. A small group of enthusiasts isn't going to get critical mass. Until there is a compelling event to use Open Hardware (and Meltdown&Spectre is not it), Open Hardware will remain peripheral to the mainstream proprietary approach. A lot of the enthusiasm for Open Hardware is untempered by reality.