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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 TheRaven on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:25AM
This depends a lot on the ecosystem. Most Mac apps are proprietary and may depend on libraries that are not source-available, licensed from third parties. Getting everyone to recompile their code was a pain.
A lot of Windows apps, in contrast, are shipped as .NET bytecodes, so you can change architecture by porting the CLR JIT. Unfortunately, a lot of the popular ones are still shipped as x86 binaries, so you'd need an emulator.
Most Android apps are distributed as Dalvik bytecode, though a lot include native libraries. The libraries communicate with the rest of the system via a fairly well-defined interface (including talking to system libraries), so it's possible to emulate only this code and run the rest natively.
Most *NIX apps are distributed as source code that's been tested on at least a couple of architectures, so once you have the relevant toolchain working you just need to port them. Once we have a working toolchain for AArch64, for example, it was pretty easy for us to get about 90% of the packages that are available for FreeBSD/x86-64 for FreeBSD/AArch64.
Most iOS apps are now provided to Apple as LLVM IR and distributed via the app store. It would be entirely feasible for them to add a new LLVM back end and ship almost all existing apps for it.
sudo mod me up