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Open Source CPUs Coming To a Club Near You?

Posted by timothy on from the more-the-better dept.

lekernel writes "The Milkymist project (also mentioned earlier this year) have started shipping their so-called 'video synthesizer,' a device used by concert and other event organizers to create live visual effects. Most interestingly, the device is based on their fully open source system-on-chip design, including both a CPU and graphics accelerators — the latter being a significant part of what the Open Graphics project is still struggling with."

7 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Finally, some serious nerd on this thing. by blair1q · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I was beginning to worry that politics and journalism and business were all there was to /.

  2. Mist/vapor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Mist and vapor. Similar properties.

  3. I'm a bit ignorant on this subject I guess by Synerg1y · · Score: 2

    What exactly makes the design open source? Are they talking about open sourcing the drivers? Cause as with the omega project, there's just a long line of developers lining around the corner to do assembly level programming to reinvent the wheel to make it smaller (sarcasm to the max, nobody wants to work on this shit).

    Also seems they have a profit model going here, open source here means, we'll take all your code and then close the source once we have enough and are making enough $.

    1. Re:I'm a bit ignorant on this subject I guess by Mr+Z · · Score: 3, Informative

      I take it you've never built hardware at the "design circuit boards and get them assembled" level. It's capital intensive. For my simple projects, the difference in cost per board was about 5-10x between a run of 5 and a run of 500. Of course they're selling these, because if they sell enough, they're cheaper for everyone. If everyone had to build one from scratch, nobody would, because they'd cost about $1000 more. Looks like it's a 6 layer board. I don't think that's something you can etch in your bathroom sink with a copper clad board from your local Fry's.

      And they're truly open source. It's all GPLv3 or CC BY-SA 3.0. They provide the VHDL, the board design files (and the resulting Gerbers), everything. And according to their FAQ, they're even working on a free toolchain to compile the FPGA code.

      --
      Program Intellivision!
  4. FPGA by Ironchew · · Score: 3, Informative

    The technical overview says the system-on-a-chip is implemented with FPGAs, and the open-source component is the Verilog HDL code.

    1. Re:FPGA by hedwards · · Score: 2

      OK, I was wondering what problem this would solve that couldn't be more economically solved via FPGA. FPGAs have their issues, but unless you're intending to do a fairly substantial run of chips, I can't imagine it being practical without using FPGA chips.

    2. Re:FPGA by lekernel · · Score: 2

      See here: http://www.ohwr.org/attachments/821/sebastien.pdf