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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: 2) by looorg on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:54PM (1 child)
This is in essence what it comes down to. While it run Windows? If not will it run something that I can run all the standard application on? Will I have to replace all my other hardware to fit in with this? What companies are going to support this? I guess the best thing that could happen would be if some Industry giant just decided they had enough of the Intel shitshow and decided to do their own thing -- looking at Google (time to not be evil again ...) or one of the console companies or something else. You probably need to pull it all in .. desktop users, gamers etc otherwise this probably won't take off. While a Finn working in his student dorm (or whatever) for a few decades might be a great approach I just don't think this will ever take off then. But perhaps this is what it will take to bring about the Year of the Linux desktop ...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:42AM
Those who've suckled exclusively at the Microsoft teet may tremble at the prospect of having to change hardware and software, but it's nothing new elsewhere. Apple has broken ties with the past repeatedly, forcing customers to buy new hardware and software. USB-A? Gone. FireWire? Gone. Optical storage? Gone. Floppy drives? Serial ports? ADB? All gone. SCSI? Gone. PowerPC? Gone. 68000-series? Gone.
It's painful to change, but if it's done for the right reasons it can be a good thing. Giving up exclusive reliance on Windows is a good reason.