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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 bobthecimmerian on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:41PM
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's important to keep in mind that the pace of hardware performance improvements has slowed dramatically in the past ten years.
I have a desktop PC with a twelve year old dual core processor and 4GB of DDR2 RAM. When I had a cheap SSD in it, the performance was excellent. One of the two desktops I use most often has an AMD multicore processor from 2010, and AMD wasn't especially competitive with Intel at the time. So some team assembling a RISC-V or similar product for home users doesn't need to match a Broadwell Core i5 or Snapdragon 620 to make their effort useful. They don't even have to match a Core 2 Quad or a Snapdragon 400. I'm not saying this kind of thing will be easy to manage, just that the requirements for a viable product people genuinely will buy are substantially behind the state-of-the-art.