Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Finally Hits Real Silicon
pagercam2 writes "While Open Source software has many success stories, hardware and particularly chips haven't had as much. While there have been multiple Open Source projects, none have come to a final product until now. The OpenRISC 1000 has been implemented by Flextronics Semiconductor(a division of Flextronics, the contract manufacturer possibly best known for its production of many Cisco products) along with PCI, 10/100 Ethernet, serial, GPIO etc. ... Details and pretty pictures available at OpenCores.org, and it even runs uClinux. Good Job!"
I think it's either gonna end up like that, which would be great, or it's gonna end up with the slashdot crowd all being locked up for using Linux on hardware which breaches Uber-DMCA codes and is a tool of the terrorist communist nazis who go round killing puppies.
Having just read back my own post, I'm really hoping we get OSH (open source hardware) going before it becomes illegal to develop.
A lot of what's floating in space runs with what we could consider antiquated hardware.
Old != Junk
Trolling is a art,
Just my two cents...
Procrastination sucks.
How about the old VW sedan, especially the off-patent parts? Can an open-source automobile design based on, say, the 1980 VW sedan be set-up and evolved in poor countries?
You'll never be able to produce an automobile en mass scale cheaper than VW (or nearly as good).
In general, what problems would there be in creating open-source engineering designs for hardware of all kinds branched off from off-patent intellectual property?
Again you would never be able to mass produce the item cheaper than a proprietary company. Besides there is very little demand for box cameras and tube radios.
I'll take an open-source, standards-compliant 486 computer over a 2Ghz Trusted Computing appliance any day.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
"Why should major companies control the architechures that we are using? "
Because advanced CAD tools to design state of the art microprocessors costs millions of dollars. Even if you afford these tools, state-of-the-art fabs cost billions of dollars. Open Source works in software because equipment to develop software is cheap enough that anyone can afford it. Equipment to develop hardware costs a fortune, and needs some corporate support, or a lot of donations. Until a process makes it to MOSIS, the average person can't afford access to it.
Vote for Pedro
Maybe today open hardware is an esoteric industry. But with self-assembling circuits being the way things are heading (What? IBM's announcement of self-assembling FLASH didn't make Slashdot? Shame on the mods.) that'll change. Why? Because the most practical way to make dense circuits will be as an FPGA where the self-assembling units are not FLASH modules but FPGA cells. In effect, all major components become FPGAs.
:v)
But it won't stop there. Turning this new capability to its advantage, it will make sense to re-compile the CPU cores to perform the task at hand with maximum efficiency. If you're going to start doing that, an open design is nigh on essential.
We are rapidly entering an era where it is worth designing things that cannot yet be built, because the manufacturing technology is catching up very rapidly. Even now, Sony are designing their consumer device chipsets as FPGAs to shorten time to market. The trend will not decrease.
Vik
It's one hell of a LONG way from making an 300K gate FPGA work at 150Mhz to making a 32/64 bit CPU at 2GHz! A modern CPU core may have as many as a few million gates. Add in on-chip cache and other things and that number gets higher. Now if you want to talk micro-controller then 300K gates might get you a decent 8/16 bit one like the old 8051s (which you can do a LOT with but I don't think it would run Linux). Your idea sounds like a good Sr. Project for a CSE class in Computer Architecture.
guys,
while i'm sure the opencores crowd has done an outstanding job, you need to look further at the Big Picture.... and comparable processors.
a motorola ppc8245 at 300MHz is $19 in qty (at least that's what we pay). it has all of the features enumerated in the article above (16K caches, PCI, MMU, ethernet, dual UARTs, etc etc etc), and is supplied replete with a Big DataBook of We're Pretty Damn Sure This Will Work Knowledge and 10e6 embedded programmers worldwide. not to mention an entire library of (linux AND powerpc) Google entries. you can attach all manner of BDM/BDI/JTAG debuggers (e.g. BDI2000) to an 82xx and there are a half dozen compiler suites (including gcc) to choose from. boundary scan routines are already understood and implemented, which eases ICT development at production time. if it's 2AM the day before the Big Pitch to the client, i'm pretty sure i can find someone who's awake and can fix my 82xx register access problem. i'm no motorola bigot (i always try to make a PIC fit until it can't do the job) but the economies of scale are WAY WAY WAY against the little guy when it comes to microprocessors.
you are not selling your soul to moto for $19. you are making a cost effective, performance increasing, risk reducing decision, that's all.
just another datapoint.