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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the open-to-the-possibility dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:08PM (#627223)

    The folks who are likely to take this are low level device manufacturers who think that they can do stuff better/cheaper/lower risk if they are not reliant on one of the big chip manufacturers.

    I presume these outfits have something equivalent to a table of risks; and every dependency is a risk. So if I am dependent on ARM for my chips, then I have a risk that ARM - goes TITSUP; has some bug in their hardware; has some manufacturing issue (fire/strike/government intervention) in their manufacturing base that drives up costs. Indeed, a big manufacturer like WD can even develop an ecosystem and push their RISC-V investment as a product which they can sell to third parties.

    Going down the FOSS helps to develop such an ecosystem and share costs with other organisations in a similar position, so there is some benefit to not keeping everything in-house.