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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: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:18PM
What you have at that point is something like Raspberry Pi. It's a different chip. In order to get it to work someone had to build compiler back ends that target that chip. Then the kernel had to be ported to that chip. But there are tens of thousands of packages now available for Linux on Pi. The only way that even seems plausible is that it took something between zero and very little effort to port each package to the new chip -- and I suspect in most cases, simply a recompile. The apps, in general, don't address hardware. They use the C library (and others) and possibly kernel calls, which are presumably portable across architectures. I strongly suspect most of the kernel calls are only performed through standard libraries.
The beauty of that is that once you port a compiler and then the kernel using that compiler, you get the gigantic ecosystem for very little additional cost. (Please correct if this is an untrue characterization of the situation. I would be interested to know.)
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