Slashdot Mirror
Open-Source Processors
clay pigeon writes "This EE Times article covers the development of open-source processors. No doubt exciting news for hardware hackers and those with a need to know about every last detail of their systems, but how will this effect the hardware industry? Can open-source hardware duplicate the success of the open-source software movement?" I'm not holding my breath. Fabrication facilities are a lot more expensive then a CD-ROM presses (or more accurately, internet connections). But I still hope it happens. It would be an interesting market if everyone worked together on the designs, but built their own chips.
More people might be using PPC, MIPS, or StrongARM if there were inexpensive motherboards; the fact that there aren't should give the observer cause to say "Hmmm..."
I'm not sure just how far this issue extends...
The point is that it's not good enough to have a slick new CPU design; you need a system around it to take advantage of it, or, quite frankly, just to allow it to function.
Those that were prepared to "roll their own MIPS variant" to build some highly customized embedded system may find this a quite acceptable scenario. But anybody thinking that this leads to having VA Linux Systems selling F-CPU-based systems any time soon is severely delusional...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
As an intermediate, I would think that programmable logic would be a big boost to computing. This could go in an add-on card, on the motherboard, or even on the CPU die. When you want to view jpegs, it gets configured as a jpeg accelerator. When you want to generate an MD5 digest, it gets configured for this.
There are already companies working on this. At the design automation conference, I saw a company that was working with an addon card that would accelerate different algorithms. And it ran under Linux!!
RTC magazine just had an article on the 5 big technologies. One of these was Linux, and the predicted 6th technology is CPUs with embedded FPGA.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
This is hardly pathetic. To start off this will no doubt drive the creation of even better opensourced circuit development and similation software. The better such software is the less the hardware costs required to develop and debug such designs. Secondly a lot of various new techniques are opening up that would allow fabrication to be much cheaper and more likely to occur at home.
Sure open source hardware may take a while to get going as the curve to get into it is higher in both dollars and education but there have already been stabs at such things for years and it's succeeded in some lesser hardware hacking areas pretty well. Just remember if it wasn't for the home hackers we might not have PC's at all. A lot of people never thought the PC could take off for similar reasons but it seems to be doing okay. They didn't think Linux could take off but again it seems to have made a place for itself.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Would it really be that bad?
Except for having to recompile the code, Transmeta is doing exactly that. You can upgrade your CPU. If they open their code-morphing software, they you could recompile your CPU (code). That would be cool.
You can learn to be an adequate coder by reading a few books, trying something, changing the code, trying something, heck, this is how both MS and the open source world started.
This doesn't scale well to actual chip making though. You really need a thorough grounding in digital logic before you start throwing ands, nands, xors and ors around. There are no higher language equivalents like Perl or VB for chip making, it's just tedious gate and run after gate and run.
Plus, there isn't as much room for self expression in chip making either. Taking the Perl example again, using hte language and reading the Camel book you get a good idea of Larry Wall's mindset. Can you get this from a cip? No?
But, if you're a geek with delusions of grandeur and have a few thousand dollars to throw away in a fab, don't let me stop you.
Hardware design, and chip design is an esoteric and hard to understand skill, debugging a race condition in a silicon chip can take a skilled technician many many hours of painstaking labor.
Contrast this to software development which is more often than not simply drawing a pretty screen, and filling in a few callbacks.
What will happen if the notoriously poor quality control standards of 'open source' reach the hardware level ? I mean, if your kernel doesn't compile, you simply back out the changes, but if your CPU wont boot, what do you do ?
Anyway, companies like Sun have tried this with sparc international, (no doubt someone will whinge about the license) but this is essentially an open source CPU. It hasn't really caught on.
I think this is just an attempt to garner publicity.
Open Source should confine itself to the realm of software, where it makes eminent good sense.
You can learn either language relatively quickly if you know some other programming langauages - but using them for logic design does require a grounding in hardware that's outside of normal programming experience (wires, low level concurrency etc etc) - and converting a working simulation into a physical device requires a lot more infrastructure than most people have on hand ....
Um....no.
There are many high level design languages for chip design, VHDL and simulators for testing designs prior to fab.
Designed chips is very much like programing.
The Economics of Website Security
in the responses posted here so far. Most of the people seem to be whining about how much fab facilities cost, and how developing software is so much easier. Nobody talks about how much presses (both CD and Tree) cost, because we transmit our programs over the internet and run them on our own computers.
Nobody seems to know about the equivalent for hardware: Designs written in a Hardware Description language such as Verilog or VHDL can be worked on as a group. When you want to test it, you download it to an FPGA. Complete development kits including software and a protoboard can be had from Altera or Xylinx for a few hundred dollars (less if you are a student). If you make a mistake, fix your VHDL and recompile.
Also, people fail to consider that the designs for this type of thing rarely are on the level of AMD or Intel. We don't make 22 million-transistor designs, but if you want a custom hardware accelerator (say, an Ogg Vorbis accelerator, or hardware accelerated encryption where you KNOW EXACTLY what it is doing. No NSA backdoors. No worry about getting specs from OEMs.) this is the way to go about it. If your project gets popular, you can get them made in quantity as ASICs from any number of companies.
Please, people, look into these things before you start flaming a project like this.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Je t'aime Stéphanie
As I have tried to post twice, MIT Tech Review has an article regarding the ability to use an inkjet printer to print a semiconductor chip.
:)
/. would not have rejected this twice, never understood why!
It is a very interesting read and even speaks to the possibility of this allowing open source cpu's in the future. Imagine, downloading and printing the latest version of your cpu before upgrading to the n.n kernel it is targeted at
The speed is not yet that of a Pentium, but the researcher believes it will be someday. Wish