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!"

Comments

One can always hope..

[grub]

If they make money with this and other chip fabricators get on the open source boat then perhaps one day we'll see an entire open source chipset and motherboard combo. No "SecureThisBIOS" and "TrustedThatOS" needed.. That would be damn sweet.

Re:One can always hope..

[MoonBuggy]

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.

Where do they expect this to go?

[ObviousGuy]

What's the roadmap from here for these open core processors? Is there one?

Re:Where do they expect this to go?

[kien]

Today, we will have made a CPU to compete with the 486...

I'll take an open-source, standards-compliant 486 computer over a 2Ghz Trusted Computing appliance any day.

--K.

Flextronics Xbox

[doctor_no]

>>Flextronics Semiconductor(a division of Flextronics, the contract manufacturer possibly best known for its production of many Cisco products).

Flextronics would actually be best known for being the main manufacter of the Microsoft Xbox.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.11/flex.htm l

Re:Finally a competitor for the 286

[grub]

A lot of what's floating in space runs with what we could consider antiquated hardware.

Old != Junk

Open Source Chipsets

[Raynach]

I, for one, would like to see the open source community making open source chipsets, from the design, material, and the software to make it work. This is basically rebuilding the computer from the ground up, except with an open source backing of it. Why should major companies control the architechures that we are using? Although, the manafacteur of these chips may be a problem, but it would be very interesting to see electrical and computer engineers working on an open project to make a suprerior chip. This could, in fact, prove Moore totally wrong.

Or, I'm just being fanatical and ranting about nothing, whatever.

Re:Open Source Chipsets

[twiddlingbits]

Sure it could be done, up to and including the design verification using chip simulations, but actually making the chips and debugging the silicon process could get very expensive. I'm sure you could find a foundry in Taiwan or China to produce it, but would there be a market for it so you could get back all those startup costs? Do you know of some folks who have a few hundred K to invest against AMD, Intel, Motorola and IBM for a tiny slice of the market? Hardware has a lot of startup costs than software to get it to market. It's not like compiling the new code for your kernal fix. Maybe if it was specialized and optimized for embedded applications it might have a shot. I guess you could call it the "Penguin" chip since I'm assuming it would be optimized for Linux.

What can't be open-sourced?

[Un pobre guey]

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?

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? That, as it turns out, was the express purpose of the US Patent system as conceived by Benjamin Franklin, unless I am mistaken.

Re:What can't be open-sourced?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So what's the point?

[Afromelonhead]

I guess I can see how this would appeal to the many /. readers who are very pro-Open Source. To me, though, this has a distinctly different application than that of Open Source software. Sure, people have loads of hard drives and other random computers to go installing all their *BSD/Linux, but how many people have the ability to produce these chips? In addition, many, many people have at least some coding ability that can be used to contribute to the Open Source software projects, but do that many people really have the ability to recognize mistakes on the circuit boards and actually fix them?

Just my two cents...

Re:Whats the point........

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can anyone seriously point out some practical applications of this processor?"

Sure.

For chips derived from this test SoC:

MP3player
VoIP hard phone
Network Router
Firewall
Wireless Access Point
DVD player
Car stereo
Cell Phone
PDA

For uClinux:

It's all around you, many of the products _you_ use every day run it. Just because you think Linux means servers and desktops doesn't mean that's the only place it's widely deployed!

J

Re:Almost Used in iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you hear? Honda is purchasing Apple. I work in middle management at Hopple MotorComps, so you can believe me.

Re:So what's Sparc V?

[AKAImBatman]

Have open-source cores been available to implement those specs been available for a LONG time?

For quite awhile, as I understand. The Leon chip is an example of this. Other areas such as Fujitsu's processors and set top devices have been based on Sparc.

I'm not saying that OpenCores is a bad thing. I'm just refuting this "we were here first" bullshit.

Re:Watch out...

[robslimo]

I appreciate the joke, heh, heh.

But I'd like to point out that opencores has had a fair amount of its open IP commited to silicon to date... not via lithographic processes maybe, but in FPGA's at least in onesies twosies lots if not more.

It's pretty sweet to be able to put a Z80 core on an FPGA along with a few peripheral cores and make a machine-on-a-chip that can run your legacy embedded code with little or no change... and at a faster clock rate.

It was a trick question

[Un pobre guey]

Those of you who claim it can't be done for reasons of economy of scale or emission regulations, among other things, are mistaken. Much of the work that would be required has already been done and has been on the market for decades. I was not thinking of the First World market. In the Third World, hand-made auto parts and Mom-and-Pop auto part factories are common. In that context, they are in effect pirating existing IP. To go the whole way and create an open-source design spec with easy to determine compliance tests would be the next logical step.

This represents a branch point from the First World industrial paradigm of economy of scale and elimination of manual labor, coupled with planned obsolescence and faddishness to ensure a short interval between new car purchases. An open-source car reverses this drastically. Low economy of scale and higher manual labor content coupled with an open-ended product lifetime shifts the focus from the manufacture of the car to that of its components. The car owner repairs the vehicle over a period of many years, possibly turning over the majority of its components one or more times over a long period of time. Small-scale manufacturers would build a mix of components based on demand for specific versions of a component. Clever management of the project should consciously support this. This business model is unsustainable by massive industrial concerns, but might work well in an economy with lower-skilled, small-scale enterprise. It would not be massively profitable, but may be a model for keeping large populations employed.

If the interconnection ot the automobile's components is carefully and thoughtfully evolved, a single vehicle might be an ever-changing machine, gradually absorbing better components over time. It would not be a static piece of technology that quickly becomes obsolete. This is a subtext of my original post.

Re:whats the point? - It moves is the point.

[vik]

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.

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 :v)

Re:So what's Sparc V?

[annodomini]

Um, it's an open standard (by some definition), not open source.

From the SPARC website:

Any version of the SPARC Instruction Set can be licensed from SPARC International, and then used to design processors implementing that open standard. Truly - in letter and in spirit, SPARC's open - for business!

Hell, it doesn't even look like much of an open standard. You need to license the instruction set in order to be able to implement it. This is like saying UNIX is open source, since anyone can implement POSIX and license the UNIX trademark, and because a lot of people have licensed the source code. That's not open source; it may be an open standard (although I'd argue that in order to be an open standard, you can't restrict who implements it with licensing agreements). So really, SPARC is in no way open source, and I wouldn't even consider it an open standard.

OpenCores, on the other hand, is really open source. You get the full design of the entire chip; you could just produce the chip by sending the CAD files to a chip fab and having them produce it. All of the Verilog/VHDL/etc. are open and freely available for you to use and modify. Even if you license the SPARC ISA, you still have to design the chip yourself.

Hell, there are plenty of ISA's that you can license. The IA32 architecture is implemented by Intel, AMD, Transmeta, and others. PowerPC is implemented by IBM and Motorola. MIPS chips are produced by lots of people. Open ISA's are a dime a dozen. What's important about OpenCores is that the full chip design is completely open.