Can We Replace Intel x86 With an Open Source Chip? (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Jason Perlow, the senior technology editor at ZDNet: Perhaps the Meltdown and Spectre bugs are the impetus for making long-overdue changes to the core DNA of the semiconductor industry and how chip architectures are designed... Linux (and other related FOSS tech that forms the overall stack) is now a mainstream operating system that forms the basis of public cloud infrastructure and the foundational software technology in mobile and Internet of Things (IoT)... We need to develop a modern equivalent of an OpenSPARC that any processor foundry can build upon without licensing of IP, in order to drive down the costs of building microprocessors at immense scale for the cloud, for mobile and the IoT. It makes the $200 smartphone as well as hyperscale datacenter lifecycle management that much more viable and cost-effective.

Just as Linux and open source transformed how we view operating systems and application software, we need the equivalent for microprocessors in order to move out of the private datacenter rife with these legacy issues and into the green field of the cloud... The fact that we have these software technologies that now enable us to easily abstract from the chip hardware enables us to correct and improve the chips through community efforts as needs arise... We need to stop thinking about microprocessor systems' architectures as these licensed things that are developed in secrecy by mega-companies like Intel or AMD or even ARM... The reality is that we now need to create something new, free from any legacy entities and baggage that has been driving the industry and dragging it down the past 40 years. Just as was done with Linux.
The bigger question is which chip should take its place. "I don't see ARM donating its IP to this effort, and I think OpenSPARC may not be it either. Perhaps IBM OpenPOWER? It would certainly be a nice gesture of Big Blue to open their specification up further without any additional licensing, and it would help to maintain and establish the company's relevancy in the cloud going forward.

"RISC-V, which is being developed by UC Berkeley, is completely Open Source."

Comments

No

[Anonymous Coward]

No

Re:No

[swamp_ig]

IC design isn't something you can do in your spare time. You need a full-scale industrial process.

Re:No

[K. S. Kyosuke]

IC design isn't something you can do in your spare time. You need a full-scale industrial process.

You mean IC manufacturing? I'm pretty sure design is largely independent. If it weren't, ARM wouldn't be able to sell synthesizable CPU cores.

Re:No

[sanf780]

ARM does sell synthesizable cores. What synthesizable means is that you can convert that code into logic gates. So you need at least a standard cell library with the fine detail of those logic gates. Memories are not included, as memories are not synthesizable code if you really want a high bit density and low power usage. In order to get data in and out of the chip, you will also need a DDR interface (this is not synthesizable) with also a DDR memory controller (this one is). Add to this one that you need to generate internal clocks, so you might also want to get a few phase locked loop blocks. Recent CPUs also include some sort of dynamic voltage scaling, frequency scaling, thermal protection, etc. You also want to have peripherals connected through SPI, I2C, maybe UART, and maybe you want an interconnect fabric so that the CPU can talk to them. I am sure I am missing a lot of these things.

So, it is not just the CPU core, you need a lot more of things in order to get some product. FPGA manufacturers give you both the hardware and the software to translate the code into something you can upload to that FPGA, and usually give you some freebies like DDR and PLLs. However, there are limitations on what you can get from an FPGA. ICs are the way to go if you want to be on the bleeding edge on either performance, price or power efficiency. And as far as I know, the tools to do ICs in advanced processes like 10nm are not either free to use or open source. They are probably also a patent field. At the end of the day, you do not want to spend over one million dollars with tools that tell you "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK".

Re:No

[Pulzar]

Clock guys are like driver guys... the stuff they write and develop is quite a bit different from everything else.

The guys who work on caches, decode, fetch, etc. are all fairly interchangeable, if you've got a good architect to direct and oversee the work.

Re:No

[TooManyNames]

Yeah, no. That's very, very wrong.

Much of a processor can be designed in RTL (the type of code you could open source), but there are critical components (as in, CPUs do not function without them -- at all) that require detailed knowledge of the underlying process. Any sort of clock distribution, selection, skewing, or balancing, for example, pretty much requires not only detailed knowledge of the types of gates available in process libraries, but also exhaustive simulations across all kinds of different timing scenarios to ensure that designs work as intended. Additionally, these types of circuits are not trivial to design, and they're often tightly integrated into the rest of a design in a way that isn't exactly modular (as in, even if there are separate clocking modules, design assumptions make removal or modifications of those clocking modules quite difficult).

Maybe you could get away with an open core on an FPGA, but if you do that, you're going to sacrifice a lot in terms of performance -- as in getting at best into the 100s of MHz range compared to GHz for an ASIC. Moreover, you're not going to squeeze multiple cores and huge caches onto a single FPGA, so you'll need some sort of stitching to get anything even remotely close to your most basic Intel off-the-shelf processor.

Basically the best you'll be able to say with a purely open source CPU is, "buy this for 10x the cost and at 1/10th the performance... but you can feel good that it's open source." At that point, all I can say is, "good luck with that."

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew a guy who's entire job for over a year at HP was to *route* the clock signal across a single chip (this was on the Superdome chipset).

Yes, anyone can design the basic ISA logic of a chip. But it takes *huge* teams of people to design a *good* chip with all the modern features that we seem to take for granted such as variable clock and power states, or even more complicated letting them vary across different portions of the same chip. Not to mention coordinating the design and validating the DRC against the manufacturing process.

There's a really good reason that CPU chip design is only done these days by a very small handful of billion dollar companies with billion dollar budgets. These designs are very complicated and it's no wonder that they keep the IP--they've invested a *lot* to develop it.

Trivializing it by suggesting that an open source development model could equal or best these products is a tad naive. Unless we were living in a Star Trek economy and there were a few thousand contributors working on it full-time (the same size workforce as these big vendors), I don't see any chance of a competitive result.

Not sure what you mean by that

[squiggleslash]

OpenSPARC is open source, the entire reason for the existence of that word was to brand Sun's open-source SPARC project. So, given it's a relatively mature and respected design, you could definitely use OpenSPARC as the basis of an open source CPU design.

The question is really whether the OS hardware community is actually likely to produce something comparable to Intel or AMD, even given a start with the SPARC design. I... don't want to say it's impossible, but it certainly seems somewhat more difficult than producing a better operating system than Microsoft can.

Of course we can!

[cheesyweasel]

What version of DOS would you like to run on it?

How does an open source chip solve the problem?

[JoeyRox]

Being open source doesn't magically prevent bugs from reaching the silicon stage of a chip's design, nor does it make it any easier to fix bugs baked into a completed design. There are only so many people in the world smart enough to even fully understand modern superscalar designs let alone contribute usefully to it.

Power9 is a pretty good candidate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, look at IBM's Power9-based Talos Workstation. It has open firmware, open microcode, open BMC firmware so pretty much all of it is auditable. Is it secure? Who knows...

The downside is obviously the price.

Repositories:
https://git.raptorcs.com/git/
https://github.com/open-power
https://github.com/openbmc

To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenSSL being open source didnâ(TM)t find or prevent Heartbleed.

An open chip likely wouldnâ(TM)t have affected meltdown or spectre. This wasnâ(TM)t negligence by Intel (as evidenced that some of the recent vulnerabilities were shared by AMD chips on a completely different architecture.

The problem isnâ(TM)t that Intel failed to secure something obvious. Itâ(TM)s that there was a mechanism that everyone knew about, but which all experts thought couldnâ(TM)t be used to extract data. Then someone found a clever technique nobody thought of before that made everyone realize it WAS vulnerable.

Being open wouldnâ(TM)t have prevented the issue. Indeed, the issue was found by third-party researchers who didnâ(TM)t have access to the low level details of the architecture.

Open Source is not a panacea.

Just one way to get everything you want

[Bruce Perens]

If you really want an Open Source, after-market bug fixes, and security, the best way to do that is to use not a CPU at all but a programmable gate-array. This also gives you the ability to have evolution in purchased hardware, for example improvement of the instruction set. The problem is finding a gate-array that is fast enough, dense enough, and power-conserving enough.

It would be cool to code your own special-purpose algorithm accelerators in VHDL or Verilog, etc.

This is sort of on the edge of practical, if you have the money to spend. Not as fast, not as powerful, uses more electricity, infinitely flexible. Certainly there would be some good research papers, etc., in building one.

Uh, ZDNet? Really?

[asackett]

It's not surprising that someone who doesn't seem to know that "the cloud" *is* private data centers also knows nothing of IC fab.

Re: Oh Really

[Bruce Perens]

I doubt that open source hardware would prevent hardware bugs, but it would provide a way of avoiding backdoors that are intentionally placed. You're absolutely right in that respect.

Use of gate-arrays would make the bugs reprogrammable. And now that we have mobile gate-arrays, performance is actually getting pretty good.

Re:Nice

[TheRaven64]

Proof of correctness is elusive, because it first requires that you specify what 'correctness' means. Processors vulnerable to this would have passed formal verification until recently, because processor vendors explicitly did not consider side channels to be easily exploitable. Now people are scrambling to add things like 'speculative execution must not change any observable aspects of microarchitectural state' to their specs. That's easy to write in English, but defining what 'observable aspects of microarchitectural state' are in a formal specification is really hard (particularly given that temporal aspects are really hard to talk about at all in most existing specification languages). That said, I'm collaborating with a group that is working on some of this.

seL4 (not L4) is actually a really good example. It was about 6 hours between the release of the formally verified microkernel and the first exploit being released. The implementation was correct with regard to the specification, but the specification didn't account for everything. It's worth remembering that Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem basically tells you that this kind of verification is impossible: a sufficiently detailed specification of what 'correct' means will, for any nontrivial system, be more complex than the implementation and must itself be correct for the proof to be useful.