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'Is It Time For Open Processors?' (lwn.net)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the time's-up dept.

Linux kernel developer (and LWN.net co-founder) Jonathan Corbet recently posted an essay with a tantalizing title: "Is it time for open processors?" He cited several "serious initiatives", including the OpenPOWER effort, OpenSPARC, and OpenRISC, adding that "much of the momentum" appears to be with the RISC-V architecture. An anonymous reader quotes LWN.net: The [RISC-V] project is primarily focused on the instruction-set architecture, rather than on specific implementations, but free hardware designs do exist. Western Digital recently announced that it will be using RISC-V processors in its storage products, a decision that could lead to the shipment of RISC-V by the billion. There is a development kit available for those who would like to play with this processor and a number of designs for cores are available... RISC-V seems to have quite a bit of commercial support behind it -- the RISC-V Foundation has a long list of members. It seems likely that this architecture will continue to progress for some time.
Here's some of the reasons that Corbet argues open souce hardware "would certainly offer some benefits, but it would be no panacea."
  • "While compilers can be had for free, the same is not true of chip fabrication facilities, especially the expensive fabs needed to create high-end processors... It will never be as easy or as cheap as typing 'make'..."
  • "Without some way of verifying underlying design of an actual piece of hardware, we'll never really know if a given chip implements the design that we're told it does..."
  • "Even if RISC-V becomes successful in the marketplace, chances are good that the processors we can actually buy will not come with freely licensed designs..."
  • "Finally, even if we end up with entirely open processors, that will not bring an end to vulnerabilities at that level. We have a free kernel, but the kernel vulnerabilities come just the same. Open hardware may give us more confidence in the long term that we can retain control of our systems, but it is certainly not a magic wand that will wave our problems away."

"None of this should prevent us from trying to bring more openness and freedom to the design of our hardware, though. Once upon a time, creating a free operating system seemed like an insurmountably difficult task, but we have done it, multiple times over. Moving away from proprietary hardware designs may be one of our best chances for keeping our freedom; it would be foolish not to try."

111 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. No chance of becoming mainstream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It seems doubtful that any person could understand all the complexities involved in a modern high end processor. It takes several teams of designers to design them. An open hardware project is unlikely to get the manpower required.

    1. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by OrangeTide · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There are several dozen teams designing RISC-V implementations. And many ASICs have RISC-V cores buried in them today. With a handful of designs being open.
      The main barrier for ordinary people and software developers to have a proper R5 workstation is for there to be a market for such a chip. Right now the market is driven by the needs of ASICs, and that's not really what people are asking for when they say an "Open" processor.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    2. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by alvinrod · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It might find some niche even if never becomes a mainstream product, much like Linux never really took off on the desktop, but became insanely important in the server space. I suspect that this could be successful for low-cost devices that need a lightweight processor. As overall device costs decrease, the extra costs from buying a third party SoC become larger and using an old process node and an open design is going to result in some potentially significant savings.

      I also think something like this has some value in education even if it doesn't do much commercially.

    3. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are several dozen teams designing RISC-V implementations. And many ASICs have RISC-V cores buried in them today. With a handful of designs being open.
      The main barrier for ordinary people and software developers to have a proper R5 workstation is for there to be a market for such a chip. Right now the market is driven by the needs of ASICs, and that's not really what people are asking for when they say an "Open" processor.

      Designing the architecture and logic is fraction of the engineering effort necessary to design and build a modern high end microprocessor.

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    4. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by valnar · · Score: 1

      Yep, they might as well try to build an open source spaceship while they're at it.

    5. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not even that. There is actual expense involved. You will not be downloading a Risc-V or any other processor core and then going to a 3d printer to print it. That will never happen. The technology for 3D-printing right now couldn't even 3d-print a tube for an analog computer.

      What people are using right now are FPGA's which cost 100x more than the chip core they are capable of emulating. Most of these FPGA's that are in affordable range can barely emulate an 8-bit computer. So unless you want to sacrifice the performance of an Intel i7 in favor of an Z80, no I think this is barking entirely up the wrong tree.

      We have to be resigned to the fact that there will never be "free cpu"'s at all. A chip fab will not spend a billion dollars on a facility, and then produce everything for free. That's insane.

      Where we can potentially break the ceiling on proprietary designs lies more in breaking the CPU up into pieces that can first be designed using multiple FPGA units, and once those designs are proven to work, license those out pieces out to whoever is willing to finance the production of the ASIC's that must not be modified from the open design. If you allow third parties to modify it, then we're back to proprietary designs again. This is one of the quite literal best use cases for GPL-like provisions. Any ASIC released, must be released with everything required to reproduce the ASIC.

      A monolithic design similar to the i7 in scale, will simple not be possible without someone like Apple adopting it, and nobody else out there is willing to fight the inertia to do such a thing. Even Nintendo has moved away from RISC to ARM.

      You can buy RISC-V asic's currently https://www.sifive.com/posts/2017/10/04/sifive-launches-first-risc-v-based-cpu-core-with-linux-support/

      But you're looking at a chip that is so slow, that you would not be sticking this in servers or desktops, it would be relegated to hobby devices.

    6. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by ClosedSource · · Score: 2

      Did a lot of people really say that Linux would never compete against "real" operating systems in 1991-1992? But what's the connection anyway?

      First person: "You can't travel faster than the speed of light"
      Second person: "They said the exact same thing about traveling to the moon".

    7. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      The exact same thing was said about Linux in 1991-1992, that it would never compete against "real" operating systems like Solaris, ULTRIX, and others.

      That is not my recollection. There was a demo of X11 running on SLS Linux at the 1992 SUG meeting, and the folks from Sun were giving each other very concerned looks. They clearly saw it as a serious threat.

    8. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Why?

      You can't use an ARM instruction set without a license from ARM.

      There are no such limitations with RSIC V.

    9. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Designing the architecture and logic is fraction of the engineering effort necessary to design and build a modern high end microprocessor.

      In addition, a high end processor needs a complicated motherboard to run it, with high speed memory, and various peripheral I/O systems, driven by separate ASICs, or integrated in the CPU. A desktop PC motherboard is a very complex design, which is only made affordable by huge volumes.

    10. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by gtall · · Score: 1

      I take you want computers that are collections of discrete components again. The entire System-on-a-Chip world more or less negated that as a design philosophy. It's too complicated and too slow in execution, and is a security nightmare.

    11. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by fendragon · · Score: 1

      Low cost devices that need a lightweight processor are well served by the lower end ARM core chips which don't do speculative execution and the other things that make them vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown. The Cortex-m series aren't on the list of vulnerable CPUs, for example.

    12. Re: No chance of becoming mainstream by Brockmire · · Score: 1

      Software tools to aid the hardware design. It's still a hardware project, not a software project.

    13. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by shufflingb · · Score: 1

      I'd not be so sure.

      Within the industry these projects are viewed both as a means to educate and also as a tool to keep the existing incumbents (ARM, Intel etc) "honest". If the incumbents screw up, or get too greedy, then it's known that there are many other businesses with both Open Source track records and the ability to assemble the necessary resources to eat (at least part of) the incumbents lunches. They know this and the potential challengers know this.

      Up to now it's not really happened, but is it so inconceivable that in the future someone like Google might not fall out with the incumbents? decide instead to create their own designs maybe because they wanted to further differentiate their phones, servers, switches etc? maybe because at their scale they've calculated it'd be cheaper?

    14. Re: No chance of becoming mainstream by Brockmire · · Score: 1

      Because it was hard and expensive, not because it was impossible (human going faster than speed of light and living). Not equal.

    15. Re: No chance of becoming mainstream by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      No faster-than-light communication or travel seems to be a very fundamental part of the way the universe works. The laws of physics conspire against our sci-fi dreams.

    16. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1
      The exact same thing was said about Linux in 1991-1992, that it would never compete against "real" operating systems like Solaris, ULTRIX, and others.

      No sane person ever said any such thing. The whole of Unix was written by Ken and Dennis in their lunch breaks, not just the kernel. Minix was not such a great deal either.

      An OS was smaller then, because
      (a) there were no GUIs
      (b) most of the "utilities" we expect now were not considered part of the system (and that often included the compiler and linker) (c) there was less bloat (Multics excepted).

      As is said elsewhere - these days, a processor is a lot more than the CPU. However, most of the rest is well known - how to cache - or externally defined (Memory and peripheral interfaces).

      In reality, the system architecture is defined in software (VHDL). Most generation of test software should be highly automated. So, yes ... the problems of an open source processor are mostly political.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    17. Re: No chance of becoming mainstream by andre.gompel · · Score: 1

      Sounds like a great idea. We may be quite closer to this endeavor than the poster think.

    18. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      Designing the architecture and logic is fraction of the engineering effort necessary to design and build a modern high end microprocessor.

      Sure. I can go into those details if you'd like, I was part of a team that brought up possibly the largest SoC design to date (300mm2). It's an 8x ARMv8.2 (64-bit) SoC, and designed for high performance. I mainly participated in the very large engineering team that tested the design from the software side, to insure that SW doesn't turn up any holes in the HW verification or to test more complex interactions between multiple IPs. (it's kind of like how a pure SW project would have unit tests, but also test the fully integrated package with black box QA)

      In the end it's time and money. If you want you can hire contractors to do all the work, or you can be like my company and do it entirely in-house at great expense.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    19. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by sjames · · Score: 1

      But it did. Further, WD has plans to use RISC-V cores in future products.

    20. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by sjames · · Score: 1

      Yes. They said that a bunch of unorganized hobbiests could never get it together and manage the complexity that is a modern OS. Very similar to the arguments that an open processor can't happen.

    21. Re:No chance of becoming mainstream by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      There are two problems with that. The first is that negotiating even a simple ARM license is complex and time consuming. If all you want is an off-the-shelf SoC with an ARM core, then that's fine and you don't need to worry because someone else has done it, but if you want to produce a new SoC that has a generic CPU core and some domain-specific accelerator then that means you need a license and you're looking at two years to negotiate it. The second is that those ARM royalties add up quickly in low-volume markets. Micron is looking at moving to RISC-V, because they're in a very low margin business and the license fees for the 7 ARM cores that they put on the controller boards for their SSDs eat a big chunk of their profit. They don't need very fast cores, they don't care about the software ecosystem beyond having a half decent C compiler, and they don't care too much about power (the flash chips will be using a lot more than the controller).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    22. Re: No chance of becoming mainstream by painandgreed · · Score: 1

      No faster-than-light communication or travel seems to be a very fundamental part of the way the universe works. The laws of physics conspire against our sci-fi dreams.

      Really depends on how you define 'faster than light' and which sets of physics you are using. It seems impossible in Minkowski (flat) space because things like mass, energy and time get imaginary. However, in Reinmannian (curved) space, where the general theory of relativity gets used, it depends on the topology. It's already trivial, such as in the case of gravitational lensing, to show that there are two separate lightlike paths between two points, and one gets there in less time, technically 'faster than light' as if goes faster than the other light-like path. Most "sci-fi dreams" that bother to explain things do so in ways that are not forbidden by current physics which is why we get hyperspace, worm-holes, warp drives, etc. even causality would seem to be just the way we prefer (observe) things rather than some actual natural law, except for thermodynamics (entropy) and its relation to the arrow of time.

    23. Re: No chance of becoming mainstream by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but nope. Not even the spooky magic of entanglement can transmit information instantly, though it is useful for a few other things.

  2. Yes, but... by DogDude · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... but it takes a massive amount of money to design and make chips. It's not going to happen "open source" unless some very wealthy individual or organization decides to do so for altruistic reasons.

    --
    I don't respond to AC's.
    1. Re:Yes, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That is definitely a way of looking at it. The other way to look at it is that somewhat-wealthy organisations already do invest significantly to other open projects [ not just/only open-source projects ], because it benefits them to do so.

    2. Re:Yes, but... by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 1

      The same could be said for operating systems. So, I think it could be done.

      Design would be a patent and licensing hell, but I think it could be done. In terms of manufacturing, it'd need some sort of Kickstarter approach to pay for runs from TMSC or GlobalFoundries.

    3. Re:Yes, but... by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Step 1 Find and get the rights to some new open chip design in the USA.
      Step 2. Goto the UK government and tell them of a new educational chipset design that is 100% Russian/China resistant.
      Step 3. Offer to set up a "production" line with lots of good paying local jobs in a Northern Ireland, Wales like region of the UK if granted gov funding.
      Agree to terms and get the CPU made in a low wage nation.
      Step 4. Get the money granted and fab the CPU. Ensure the CPU becomes a part of the UK educational system with some apps, GUI programming language, robot kits. Get the gov to buy the CPU for most of its schools and get the use of CPU into the national curriculum.
      When the CPU arrives in the UK, have the local workers build the "computer" around the CPU using low cost imported parts.
      Invite political leaders to see the fully imported CPU moving down local the production line and local workers expertly building the advanced 100% UK computer around the low cost fully imported CPU.
      Step 5. Lobby the UK gov for more funding for a new CPU. Return to the USA for another next gen chip design.
      Step 6. Fab the next gen CPU. Repeat the request for funding, getting a CPU design from the USA as needed.
      Step 7. Suggest that with more funding a next gen fab could be somewhere in the UK. Offer to goto the USA and bring back a turn key fab design.
      Step 8. Build a fab in the UK after political consultations to select the best location. That would welcome new tech jobs and new investment. i.e. any marginal seat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      What is needed:
      Gov funding for one skilled person in the USA who can do an open source CPU design.
      A few charming people to sell the idea to the UK gov.
      A few UK educational experts to ensure the national curriculum has to use the CPU, related GUI robot kits, GUI kits that explain the CPU, buy the educational publications to assist all teachers with the new CPU.
      Later one skilled person in the USA who can suggest a turn key fab design.
      A trade publication and consumer website to suggest/support games and other non education uses for the CPU. A way to respond to changes in CPU use and support the domestic user and their code projects for the CPU.
      Someone in the UK with a security clearance to sell the 100% Made in the UK, Russia/China resistant CPU's to the GCHQ in bulk for educational use.
      No "wealthy individual or organization" needed, just some really great lobbying to get the gov funding secured.
      Present a vision of local jobs, generations of CPU fab jobs, educational excellence for generations all over the UK.
      A trusted UK CPU the GCHQ can educate with.
      The British CPU.
      Just find the right person in the USA who can design the CPU and some low wage nation who can make it. Then sell 110% local production. The extra 10% is educational exports.
      Ask to use some of the UK foreign aid budget to fund more CPU production as free educational support in other Commonwealth nations.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    4. Re:Yes, but... by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1
      It's not going to happen "open source" unless some very wealthy individual or organization decides to do so for altruistic reasons.

      That is certainly the Windows buyer PHB perspective.

      In reality, large corporations (you have probably heard of IBM) put money into open source because it is a way to share the cost of creating and supporting infrastructure which their actual product depends on.

      We have to hope/pray that Larry Ellison has a "Road to Damascus" event, and realises that a truly open Sparc system (not just CPU) might lead to Oracle being in a far stronger position than it already is, and seriously weaken his competition. It might also mean that the nerds who currently detest him might see him as a saviour. (I am not holding my breath).

      Currently, Oracle is in the business of preventing access to drivers and microcode for machines over 5 years old and out of support, thus depriving them of second hand value - not exactly helpful to their own business - one can only assume that that Larry is possessed by the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge and hell bent on wasting the best publicity event that he could dream of.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    5. Re:Yes, but... by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1
      Goto the UK government

      No, No, a thousand times NO!!!!!!

      Any project involving a government committing to spending money is doomed, and any IT project involving the British Government, doubly or even quadruply so.

      Never mind Babbage, and Harrison's clocks, look what killed the Transputer - Mrs Thatcher promised £50M the same week United Technologies scrapped their microprocessor project saying "in the world of computers, $50M is peanuts". The funding was indeed too little, too late, and the project was sold to the French - who killed it by accident.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    6. Re:Yes, but... by lkcl · · Score: 2

      ... but it takes a massive amount of money to design and make chips. It's not going to happen "open source" unless some very wealthy individual or organization decides to do so for altruistic reasons.

      funnily enough this is precisely what has happened, quite recently, in the form of the Indian "Shakti Project". we could, up until a couple of years ago, have dismissed the Indian Government's security "paranoia" as simply... well... "paranoia"... except that it's not paranoia if they *really are* out to Get You. and thanks to the Intel ME fiasco, we know that the NSA really is screwing everybody.

      so the Indian Government has basically given the Shakti Project UNLIMITED resources to, and i quote, "Piss All Over ARM And Intel". the only thing they are not allowed to go after is Memory and NAND because if they did so it would annoy S.Korea, Taiwan *and* China, take away various Triads in those three countries main source of income, and those countries control the major Foundries... the Shakti Team would have a hard time making *anything*, anywhere. so: Memory and NAND is out... but everything else is Fair Game.

      in speaking with the head of the team last month he is happy to extend the opportunity to the Libre Software and Libre Hardware community... for free. why? well, because if you want to be able to VERIFY the entire source and the actual hardware, the entire design right to the bedrock HAS to be completely open and transparent...

      anyway i will be working with him to design a processor, anyone else is welcome to get in touch http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/...

    7. Re:Yes, but... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Yes but nearly all of them do so as a means to an end rather than as an end itself. Designing a CPU is and end. The resource and R&D requirements are many orders of magnitude higher than many other open source projects put together.

    8. Re:Yes, but... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      The same could be said for operating systems. So, I think it could be done.

      No one has created an open source OS from the ground up. The Linux we hold for granted is the efforts of hundreds of projects maintained and contributed to by thousands of people, just to get a base system going. And there's little motivation to do the same thing with a CPU given the order of magnitude difference in complexity and the requirement for something to be complete on release (rather than say some dude creating Linux, some other dude porting some utilities to it).

    9. Re:Yes, but... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      I would not say killed by accident.
      Transputers were strong in military hardware, especially the french one.
      The main companies involved where state owned. Besides tecchnical difficulties with the latest generations of Transputers, the state wanted to sell the companies that were invooved in producing Transputers.
      In the end the only high bidder was a jap. consortium.
      Mind: that was late 1980s early 1990s. Instead of selling, they feared they would be military dependent on a foreign, and even Asian, force. So they made the "fatal" decission to stop the transputer project and liquidate the involved companies.

      Sad, they were great technology, most people working with them loved them, despite the strange programming language.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    10. Re:Yes, but... by gtall · · Score: 1

      IBM put money into open source because they couldn't stand Microsoft. And in OSes, they'd already been though the Unix wars so Linux looked like a good alternative. It had little to do with creating infrastructure their products depended upon, rather it was creating infrastructure that wasn't controlled by others. At the time, they thought of themselves as a hardware company. Now they see themselves as an India company.

    11. Re:Yes, but... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      We have to hope/pray that Larry Ellison has a "Road to Damascus" event, and realises that a truly open Sparc system (not just CPU) might lead to Oracle being in a far stronger position than it already is, and seriously weaken his competition.

      How?

      Currently, Oracle is in the business of preventing access to drivers and microcode for machines over 5 years old and out of support,

      SPARC is already 5 years behind. Fujitsu already makes SPARC processors. How would giving away the IP of 5-year-behind (actually it's more like 10 or even 15 now, the single-thread performance was pathetic even compared to the available competition last time they were selling) processors help Oracle? And how would it help anyone else?

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    12. Re:Yes, but... by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      look what killed the Transputer

      Advances in "ordinary" multiprocessor computing technology, and the difficulty of developing for the platform in a strange and limited language? How is that relevant here? The transputer died because nobody wanted to use it.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    13. Re:Yes, but... by Gojira+Shipi-Taro · · Score: 2

      The idea that Larry "Lay 5% off every 6 months to keep 'em at each other's throats" Ellison would ever focus on anything but immediate gains is one of the most laughable things I've ever read on Slashdot.

      --
      "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
    14. Re:Yes, but... by tepples · · Score: 1

      From the summary:

      Western Digital recently announced that it will be using RISC-V processors in its storage products

      thegarbz wrote:

      nearly all [companies that fund development of free software and similarly licensed tech projects] do so as a means to an end rather than as an end itself. Designing a CPU is and end.

      Designing an embedded CPU is a means. The product in which it is embedded is an end. See, for example, RISC-V in Western Digital hard drives.

    15. Re:Yes, but... by AcidPenguin9873 · · Score: 1

      The performance requirements and power limitations of an embedded CPU are completely different than those of the primary processor in a general-purpose computing system. Unless you think that general-purpose computing systems are going away (I don't), then the CPUs needed for them will continue to be expensive to design and build.

    16. Re:Yes, but... by tepples · · Score: 1

      Unless you think that general-purpose computing systems are going away (I don't)

      Some people in favor of making computing safer for non-technical users by curating all publicly available software more thoroughly want the general-purpose computer to go away, with the exception of software development companies and software engineering departments of accredited postsecondary schools. See "Lockdown" by Cory Doctorow, "Civil War" by Cory Doctorow, and "On The War On General Purpose Computing" by Jon Evans.

    17. Re:Yes, but... by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      But all the new jobs in Northern Ireland and Wales... with computers. Just keep adding more funding this time. It won't be like the 1980's :)

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    18. Re:Yes, but... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      We have to hope/pray that Larry Ellison has a "Road to Damascus" event, and realises that a truly open Sparc system (not just CPU) might lead to Oracle being in a far stronger position than it already is, and seriously weaken his competition

      I really hope not. At the moment, SPARC and Itanium are dead architectures and no one has to worry about abominations like register windows coming back. We have been able to kill a load of complexity in operating systems and compilers that had to deal with these things. The last thing that we need is return of the zombie architectures.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    19. Re:Yes, but... by martinfb · · Score: 1

      Openness does not mean free hardware.
      It means freedom of access to hardware designs.

      --


      Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
    20. Re:Yes, but... by vandamme · · Score: 1

      How miserably did open source fail for Raspberry Pi and Red Hat?

  3. Modern process fab cost is prohibitive by dsgrntlxmply · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One online article notes 16nm Finfet fab entry cost at $80M, 66 mask steps. You would need a very wealthy patron.

    1. Re:Modern process fab cost is prohibitive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      That's okay. We'll just 3D print them floor to ceiling and run them at a few MHz. Move over 286, we're coming for you! X^D

  4. Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 1

    One online article notes 16nm Finfet fab entry cost at $80M, 66 mask steps.

    You don't need to build a sawmill before you can build a house, an apartment complex, or a line of cabinetry. You don't need to build a steel mill to build cars. Why should building your own fab be a prerequisite for building a line of semiconductors?

    Many big-name semiconductor companies have been "fabless", and many more have started that way. Design the chip, commission the masks, rent the fab services, split the swag.

    Let the fabrication specialists raise the captial for building and operating the manufacturing plant, tracking the technology to smaller feature sizes and higher yields. Meanwhile, they let you take the design and marketing risk - along with all their other customers, at least some of them succeeding well enough to keep them in work and profit.

    Get to tapeout. Then celebrate and take a break before packaged first silicon arrives, to be soldered to the test boards and turned into product.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
    1. Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. by gman003 · · Score: 4, Informative

      That $80M is the cost to use a fab - the cost in setting up the masks to have the fab make your processor. Building a modern fab is on the order of tens of billions of dollars.

    2. Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's more than an order of magnitude higher than the NREs we were paying for the ASICs (including sea-of-RISC network processors) the last time I was doing ASICs - abouit 5 years back.

      Has it gotten that expensive? I sincerely doubt it. But even if it has:

      You can do your prototyping at fabs that combine the prototypes from several customers into one combo wafer, split the NREs among them, and do a small run - then repeat a couple months later, ad-infinitim. If kyour design works you've already got your mask design placed and routed, and it's just a matter of making another set where you step-and-repeat for a whole wafer. (Meanwhile you can do small volumes and proofs-of-concept with the few dozen you got from the prototype run - or even get a few more made from the old masks and just get your piece.)

      --
      Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
    3. Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      That's more than an order of magnitude higher than the NREs we were paying for the ASICs (including sea-of-RISC network processors) the last time I was doing ASICs - abouit 5 years back.

      Has it gotten that expensive? I sincerely doubt it. But even if it has:

      It has IF you want the absolute top-end pervformance fabbing. You can still get fabbed off the bellding edge much more cheaply. Intel's introduction of finfets hailed a massive change in the industry which had not been seen before: it was the first time the cost per transistor increased.

       

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    4. Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Maybe we don't need bleeding edge performance. Have an untrusted CPU for performance, and a trusted one for important stuff. The trusted one doesn't have to be super high performance.

      That's basically the technique used by most security systems these days. Have a secure, low performance sub-processor just for handling secrets and validating the activity of the high performance main processor.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      If you want cutting edge, yes.

      If you can stay back a few nodes, not so bad, a few million bucks is needed (masks are expensive at about $100K/each for the older processes), so perhaps a regular 10 metal chip requires a couple million bucks.

      And while most of it is autorouted and autoplaced, you still want to hand edit the designs. Remember the reason we're at 10 metal is because for most general random logic, the limiting factor is wiring. The vast majority of transistors in any design is used in memory - caches and the like. The density falls off rapidly when you get to general logic blocks like ALUs and registers and other random logic parts. And because of the low density, you edit the layouts to sprinkle in lots of new transistors that do nothing. This is because when you're fixing bugs, you're going to need extra logic parts, and having them already in the silicon itself means only changing a few masks instead of an entire mask set.

      That's why there are steppings - A0 to A1 to A2 are metal-only changes and A0 meant a full mask set, but A1 and A2 only had marginal changes so perhaps 5 masks changed (so instead of spending $2M per pop, you spent an additional $1M). But go from A2 to B0 means you changed everything again, so a complete redesign. The reason for this is you ran out of spares, or more likely, the fix involves speed-sensitive paths and you just cannot route the spares in a way to keep the speed up.

      Anyhow, I still don't see how an open design would avoid something like Meltdown or Spectre, because those vulnerabilities came about because of novel ways of using the weaknesses of things we did to make processors so much faster, and given the entrenchment of the designs, everyone implemented the same issues, so it's really an issue going all the way back.

    6. Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. by NormalVisual · · Score: 2

      (masks are expensive at about $100K/each for the older processes)

      For sure. It was kind of entertaining when I was onsite at Infineon's fab in Munich many years back with a team installing one of our femtosecond-laser defect repair systems and one of our guys (not me, I swear!) got a little careless and put his thumb through the pellicle on a mask. The customer was not pleased.

      --
      Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
    7. Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Has it gotten that expensive?

      Yup. Krste has some interesting slides on this. The take-home summary is that the ROI for newer processes is not currently worth it. It used to be that one generation old was cheap, two was basically free, because the newer processes were so much better than the old and still won on price/performance ratios. Now, the sweet spot is closer to 4-5 generations old. You can spend a lot more on the newer processes, but you don't get very much return and it probably isn't worth it.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  5. Re:Betteridge's Law: by omnichad · · Score: 1

    Did you ever think that the person who can't be amused easily is the boring one?

  6. work with the military by Goldsmith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    DARPA had (has?) a program to try and figure out how to ensure the computer hardware DoD is purchasing is what is actually being delivered. There are more problems with hardware than simply design and the cost of buying fab time. Validation that the design was produced correctly is not trivial in complex hardware. Opening the whole process would help solve that problem, and the DoD may have the deep pockets necessary to pay for actual hardware builds.

    1. Re:work with the military by nateman1352 · · Score: 1

      Sure the DoD has the money, but even if they did fund a CPU design they never, ever would release it as open source. It would remain a classified component of one of the DoDs weapons systems. In fact, the DoD has funded specialized ASIC development, typically for stuff only they would ever need... stuff like ultra high frequency ADC's that can digitize the signal from an enemy radar or other things they can't buy commercially.

    2. Re:work with the military by gtall · · Score: 1

      Opening the process won't solve squat. The problems remain regardless of whether the designs are open or closed. The U.S. Military can already get access to designs, what it and the industry lacks are methods to ensure they are what they say they are. I'm not optimistic they will be successful given one of their approaches which one fellow relayed to me, "we'll just test the products and see that they do what they are supposed to do".

    3. Re:work with the military by gtall · · Score: 1

      DoD funds a lot of work that is let out to general industry, stop talking like it is closed shop.

    4. Re:work with the military by Goldsmith · · Score: 1

      I agree that the ways they've approached this so far have been pretty dumb. Opening the design process is trivial. Opening the fab process is not. From an industry point of view (my point of view), opening the process completely is not necessary. I simply need to be able to validate the manufacturing process, which means it needs to be open to me (the customer). Many electronics manufacturers don't understand that "I need to validate" is not the same as "you validate for me." For chip fab, that's going to require that I have a lot of access to facilities and records that fabs generally don't show to customers. DARPA's major problem is that this is an innovation needed in business relationships and pricing models, not technology.

    5. Re:work with the military by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Not even slightly true. The DoD has a policy of trying to avoid being responsible for their supply chain. DARPA regards technology transfer as one of their key metrics for success in a project like this: they want companies (ideally US companies, and especially companies that provide critical bits of national infrastructure) to adopt the results of these projects. They are also well aware of both how much open source they depend on and of how good open source is as a route for technology transfer: even if they're not going to use the open source version, they've very happy to have things published under BSD-like licenses so that everyone can look at them and build things based on them.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:work with the military by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Why do you think using an FPGA would help? All of the commercial FPGAs use proprietary place-and-route tools, have proprietary macroblocks, and have no public documentation for anything other than 'verilog goes in here'. There's as little guarantee that an FPGA-based implementation has not been tampered with as there is for an ASIC.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  7. Re:Betteridge's Law: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I believe you need to go back and re-read the REASON for the law.

    The idea for it started from "lazy journalism" - which this is none of. This is a vetted technical person actually asking a technical question to the community at large. The technical question is followed up with detailed analysis on why such a question is being asked, and the ramifications of the decision if it were to be made.

  8. People keep acting like you need cutting edge... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    processes, ignoring the fact that we have 20 years of computer assisted design experience, plus a variety of techniques which can be used with older process technologies to provide many of the benefits of newer processes on older ones.

    The guys who make the Propeller chips talked about masking costs for a Pentium 3 era process tech (0.18um) at ~200k for the stencil(s) for a Propeller 2 tape. If you don't start off assuming you will have current generation power savings or performance, that level of processor technology could be leveraged for at least a 1-1.4ghz processor core. If you skip many of the complicated, power hungry, and insecure performance techniques they used, and run a smaller cache per core, you can fit dozens of simpler designs inside of equivalent die space, and with modern improvements in bus technologies, you could run much high bus clock frequencies than what was possible in the P3 era allowing those cores to more fully utilize main memory. They might not be able to compete on the peak performance compared to other cores, but with more of them doing work and better memory bus saturation, you can get comparitively more work done per clock, and have more processes running at the same time.

    If people were serious about an open cpu/desktop motherboard/etc design, we could have it done within a year, for far less than Star Citizen has made in crowdfunding and vulture capitalism. Figure a complete desktop design including masks for under 10 million with systems available for 200-400 dollars. If this first generation of systems is secure and reliable, demand and interest will increase, allowing the funding of a second generation and so long as growth is careful allow the market to expand without saturating up to the x year replacement cycle. Done correctly it will become a self sustaining ecosystem as people claim for upgrades or systems age out and replacement is preferred over refurbishment.

    Getting the right engineering resources and the right crowdsourced financial backing together seems to be impossible for modern humans however, but the potential is there, and if engineered correctly the desktop boards could be processor agnostic, utilizing a sideband processor (think a user controlled version of Intel ME which can strap memory and then provide a compatible bios image for any known processor arch plugged into the cpu socket, while also negotiating any board specific power management, handle cpu/memory/io clock rate vs bus stability, etc.)

  9. A RISC-V would be kickin' rad by tietokone-olmi · · Score: 1

    And if sufficiently open out-of-order implementations (resistant to Spectre class exploits) don't show up, we'll emulate it in a JIT runtime that'll eventually pony up better performance than Intel chips with the TLB flush-a-rama patches. Tanenbaum's old argument about users and developers gladly suffering greater than 5% penalties to use languages like Perl and Java, and this making microkernel performance hits palatable, was recently made all too true with the fix for Meltdown turning monolithic kernels into the worst possible microkernel in terms of the TLB-retaining optimization of syscall and interrupt performance. So, if a JIT takes at most a 10% cut and introduces some weird profile-guided steady-state latency, it'll still win over a 20% worst case real world hit from the Meltdown fix (aka KPTI).

    That said, I don't know anything about RISC-V; and young ISAs usually have problems with regard to providing various things for OS kernels (like a way to have a per-thread "vsyscall area" pointer without resorting to #UD traps), and not being ambitious enough for desktop and server roles (e.g. with ASID tagged translation, string copy instructions, non-translated load and store, etc), so I'm not holding my breath on that one. A real-world battle-proven ISA like SPARC or MIPS would be preferred.

  10. China has the CPU future by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is what happened after China acquired AMD license to produce x64 chips in China, and acquired VIA's x86 license which VIA got from acquiring Cyrix.

    The CPU license pool is cracked opened. Soon CPUs in China will be 1/4 the price of Intel/AMD but has better performance.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/hardw...

    Zhaoxin launched KX-5000 quad/octa-core x86 processors on Dec 28, 2017 in Shanghai, China: image, report, translation.

    Zhaoxin revealed KX-6000 & KX-7000 roadmap: image, report, translation.

    Other reports: golem.de, pcgameshardware.de, bitsandchips.it, phoronix

    KX-5000:

    Full SOC design (integrated southbridge)
    28nm process by HLMC, 2.1 billion transistors
    4-core / 8-core SKUs, no SMT
    2.0-2.2GHz base clock, 2.4GHz max turbo
    IMC supports dual channel DDR4-2400
    PCIe 3.0 lanes
    iGPU
    integrated audio codec
    ZX-200 I/O extension (chipset): SATA3.0, USB 3.1 Gen2, Gigabit Ethernet
    OEM: Lenovo desktop M6200

    KX-6000: 16nm tick-tock

    KX-7000: new uArch, DDR5, PCIe 4.0

    Related info:

    About VIA & Zhaoxin: wikipedia and wikichip.

    KX-5000 preview: image, report

    KaiXian KX-5000 series was listed in PCI-SIG integrators list on Nov 10, 2017.

    Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-5640 in SiSoftware database.

    Zhaoxin ZX-C, KX-5000 series on exhibition on Nov 21, 2017 in Ukraine: report, translation.

    KX-5000 CPU arch: block diagram, report, translation.

    1. Re:China has the CPU future by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Yes AC consider the average CPU speed and generation.
      http://store.steampowered.com/...
      All China has to do is be in that CPU speed range for desktop games at a much lower cost every generation.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  11. You're a fucking business moron. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is their first chip, and it's already faster than half of Intel's recent low cost chip.

    All they have to do is sell whatever they have at 1/4 the price and Intel's China market will be shrunk by 75%, that means Intel/AMD will have loss of revenue and their cost will be increased due to smaller scale of mass production, which will lead to another round of market shrinkage.

    Every industry that have underestimated China have been wiped out. Not to mention IC is one of the industry that is backed by the Chinese government to win at all costs.

    Just like German and Japan's high speed rail, and soon Airbus and Boeing.

  12. Open Motorola 68000 series? by gabrieltss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How about an open version of the Motorola 68000 series of CPU's? Those were great in the day. maybe Motorola would open up the tech on them and let them be advanced. Assembly for them was easy to learn and had a very small instruction set to learn. Learning assembly on the Commodore Amiga's was a snap with the Motorola 68000 series of CPU's.

    --
    The Truth is a Virus!!!
    1. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by ClosedSource · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm not sure how useful this would be today, but clearly the 68000 was far superior to an 8088 (or even an 8086). My guess is that Intel's segmented address approach sucked-up about 20% of developer productivity on the PC. All those crazy memory models would have never existed had IBM chosen the 68000. Not to mention Extended Memory and Expanded Memory.

    2. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      ARM and other RISC machines have similar simple instruction sets.
      And looking particulary at ARM much more powerfull ideas, like every instruction can be conditional and nearly all arithmetic instructions can include a shift operation (add and shift same time).

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    3. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by NormalVisual · · Score: 1

      There really isn't any 68000 tech to be "opened up" per se - other manufacturers made 68000-compatible chips, and they're still being made today. 68000 implementations using FPGA hardware are also quite common, and often available for free. The main problem is that the 68K architecture isn't really comparable in performance to today's general-purpose offerings by Intel and AMD and there's no financial incentive to try to make them so. They're still great for embedded stuff, and as you said, they're really easy to program for.

      --
      Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
    4. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      You mean like this one? The problem with emulating a 68k is that the best kind of performance you can hope for is enough to make a fast amiga. That's pretty poky even by embedded standards, these days. And it's all well and good to say "but imagine how many of them you could have on a chip!" but then you have to figure out some sensible way to glue them all together. You'd basically end up with an inferior version of the latest SPARC chips, which weren't really competitive anyway. They're only capable of acceptable performance on embarrassingly parallelizable problems, which makes them cool for web service or databases but pretty useless for almost everything else. And since they come with a substantial price tag, it's difficult to justify them over fleets of PCs.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by Misagon · · Score: 1

      I love the 680x0. It had the most modern ISA back in its day. But it was a CISC design, not developed past the 68060 at 66MHz, which was comparable to somewhere in-between a Intel '486-DX2 and a Pentium at that clock.
      Motorola dropped the 68K in favour of the 88000 and then that for the PowerPC supposedly after it had been revealed that the 88K architecture had serious design flaws.
      You can today run a 68040 on a FPGA at 100 MHz though. (Vampire card for the Amiga).

      There is an open-hardware 32-bit RISC architecture that is somewhat similar to program assembly for: J-Core, based on the Super-H. The JC2 is based on SH2 ISA and has a BSD-style license.
      Nowadays, the patents for the SH4 ISA should also have expired, meaning that developed could continue.
      It might not be the fastest CPU architecture (only 16 regs and two-address code like M68K), but it is denser than ARM Thumb and could be useful for at least embedded systems. (In fact ARM once licensed patents from Hitachi for making ARM Thumb.)

      --
      "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
    6. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by joib · · Score: 1

      looking particulary at ARM much more powerfull ideas, like every instruction can be conditional.

      arm64 got rid of this.

    7. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by AcidPenguin9873 · · Score: 2

      ARM and other RISC machines have similar simple instruction sets.

      This hasn't been true in years. The ARM instruction set that your smartphone processor supports is big, complicated, and includes almost as much crufty legacy support as a modern x86.

    8. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by Dasher42 · · Score: 1

      Not sure whether you want more Amiga nostalgia or 68000-family processing, but either way, your cake's already baked.

      Here's a top-quality Amiga hardware emulator. https://www.armigaproject.com/

      If you want to get more hobbyist than that, here's an open high-performance 68000 processor core you can load onto an FPGA - possibly along with MiniMig or some other FPGA implementation of the Amiga. http://www.apollo-core.com/

    9. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by ShakaUVM · · Score: 1

      Nothing can compare with the x86 for cruftiness. Legacy support is one of the reasons why x86 has never been able to compete in the low power space with ARM.

      ARM32 is my favorite assembly language to program in. It's simple, easy to understand, and because its lacks a lot of mal-features like doing operations directly in memory, it's not loaded with as many traps for the unwary.

    10. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by Agripa · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure how useful this would be today, but clearly the 68000 was far superior to an 8088 (or even an 8086). My guess is that Intel's segmented address approach sucked-up about 20% of developer productivity on the PC. All those crazy memory models would have never existed had IBM chosen the 68000. Not to mention Extended Memory and Expanded Memory.

      The 68K has even worse problems. For instance unlike segmented addressing, the double indirect addressing present in the 68K involves the instruction pipeline itself.

    11. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      The old instrucction set did not change.
      Adding new suff does not necessarily make it crufty.
      Do you have an example for cruftiness on ARMs?

      Modern ARMs I only programmed in C++, but looking at the assembly code, I noticed nothing strange.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    12. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by AcidPenguin9873 · · Score: 1

      Aside from Apple, the rest of the ARM smartphones have to support ARMv7 which requires supporting Thumb/Thumb2. ARMv7 has predication on most instructions, which is a pain for an out-of-order machine, as well as a stupid FP architectural register addressing scheme. Thumb/Thumb2 is a form of instruction compression and requires the CPU to decode 2B instructions, which means that the whole "every instruction is 4B in length and on a 4B boundary" is throw out the window. ARMv8 is pretty clean, but in order to be clean it had to be somewhat different than v7, which means that supporting it requires adding *more* stuff to the hardware, not deleting anything.

      The problem isn't for a software writer - almost no one programs any of this stuff in assembly, it's all hidden by compilers, JITs, etc. It's a problem for the hardware to support it all.

    13. Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Yeah, thanks for the info, I just read up a bit about Aarm64 ... The amount of 'architectures' is quite confusing :)

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  13. France and Germany now have to team up to compete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    You don't follow world news do you.

    China built 25,000km high speed rail in 5 years, through deserts, glaciers, mountain ranges, forests, how many km have the Germans built?

    Chinese trains have become so good that Germany's Deutsche Bahn wants to buy them.
    According to DW columnist Frank Sieren, the railway can no longer afford to give preferential treatment to German companies.
    http://www.dw.com/en/sierens-c...

    Chinese train technology rolls into Germany
    http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/w...

    China is on track to build high-speed rail in just about every corner of the world
    https://qz.com/292321/china-is...

    France and Germany now have to team up to compete with China

    France-Germany rail merger aims to take on China
    http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/2...
    The deal aims to counter China's growing clout in global rail markets. Beijing stepped up its efforts in 2015 by merging two big companies into state-backed giant CRRC, which describes itself as "the world's largest supplier of rail transit equipment."

  14. Same old, same old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It took massive amounts of money to create an encyclopedia. It took massive amounts of money to make a detailed map. It took massive amounts of money to write an operating system. It took massive amounts of money to write on office suite. And then it turned out that none of these things were out of reach of the general public. I'll grant you that manufacturing is different, and one way these things turned open source is by removing physical things from the equation, but just the fact that something is traditionally expensive to do doesn't mean it can't be done in a collaborative open way.

  15. I want OpenARM by BLToday · · Score: 1

    We need OpenARM not only because ARM is ubiquitous but so there can be a company called "JOint United Research for National Exascale deliverY" making OpenARM processors. OpenARM by JOURNEY.

    1. Re:I want OpenARM by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 1

      We also need some kind of ARM Licence fee Exception Grant.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
  16. A nonstarter, or a Herculean effort by Voyager529 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Let's assume for a moment we had a rousing speech from the ghost of John F. Kennedy saying that this community should commit itself, to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of creating an open processor, and installing it safely in a computer. And Jeff Bezos thought it was a good idea and committed to writing a blank check to make it happen.

    And enough of the the few thousand people in the world who can ground-up design a processor have willingly donated their time to the effort, and have made a perfect, error-free processor with very little physical testing, and one or two of the few-dozen-at-best CPU fab plants in the world have committed their time to retool their assembly lines to decrease the output of Intel and AMD and ARM and Qualcomm chips to make a few hundred thousand of this OpenProc. Also, we're assuming that all of this is done such that there are zero patent infringements from the existing guys, and thus at no point are there any lawsuits from Intel or AMD.

    We're already comfortably in 'not happening' territory, but let's keep going.

    These CPUs need to fit into motherboards somewhere, right? I mean, the implication here is that we're looking for desktop and server chips. They're not going to work in standard Intel or AMD sockets, I'm assuming...so on the heels of designing an open processor, we need an open motherboard to fit it (which again, avoids any and all litigation as it's being designed). Somewhere in that process, we also end up with an OpenNIC and an OpenSoundBlaster and OpenSATA and FreeUSB and FreePCIe et al. Also, someone codes a ground-up open UEFI or BIOS or something that interacts with all of this hardware properly and without issue or conflict, because any issue faced in this scenario becomes the biggest possible nightmare to test. Also, Foxconn agrees to produce this MagicMobo alongside standard, more profitable units.

    Now, we've got all that hardware and can get to a boot device. What are we booting? Linux successfully compiled for this barely tested hardware using a compiler that assumes all the specs are, in fact, working as intended? Okay, great! now let's get some more software on it, because a full Linux distro, even something as relatively-simple as DSL or Puppy is going to require all of its software to be recompiled, so it's yet another race to start porting over applications, with some applications never leaving x86 due to a lack of developer interest.

    Everyone, everywhere, ever, has willingly done their part to support this new architecture. Now, to convince people to use it. Who, exactly, would that be? Some software developers and hobbyists, I mean sure, but then who? End users, even tech savvy ones, are going to be wary of an architecture where the best case scenario is a subset of standard Linux software, to say nothing about the countless Windows and OSX titles, niche hardware, and lack of laptop iterations.

    Maybe if it were heavily optimized for database loads it might have a bit of a niche there, but now you have to have someone's name on it. Who is going to be the OEM to sell these machines? Companies aren't buying motherboards and rackmount cases to start using these as servers; Dell or HP or Lenovo will have to get on board, which is rough when Intel has been their poison of choice for so long.

    So, in summary, even if everyone volunteers everything they need at every step of the way, what is the expectation? A niche market at best, which will always be treated as a second class citizen, and whose selling point is the great sacrifice made to bring it into existence.

    1. Re:A nonstarter, or a Herculean effort by Dasher42 · · Score: 1

      I think this narrative both misses a lot of niches where open processing could make a difference, and overestimates the barriers to entry.

      First, RISC-V is already being put into silicon. It's great wherever there's a need for a small, efficient core, and this means that embedded systems, microcontrollers, all that are up for grabs. Think Raspberry Pi and smaller. Think an upcoming generation of smartphones and wearables. Think more of competing with ARM than Intel and AMD.

      Second, we need this to replace the firmware being used by mainstream Intel/AMD hardware. Right now, that's a black box. We just recently found out that Intel's ME is running Minix. It's riddled with security holes. AMD's SPS has got holes too. This is attracting widespread enough attention that there's momentum here. That computer-inside-a-computer is up for grabs, even on an Intel platform.

      Third, this isn't so much competition as an open standard. This isn't of interest to some tiny upstarts, but a broad industry consortium. Apart from the Intel/AMD/POWER CPUs themselves, there's a lot of opportunity for a more efficient and open standard.

      But let's just say that the open processor standard, most likely RISC-V, progressed to where it competes with Intel/AMD for the main CPU platform. What's it going to run, you ask? Well, RISC-V support is now a part of the Linux 4.15 kernel, and cross-compilation is not hard. All that open source software can be ported, and allowing for some QA to shake some bugs out, this is doable.

      In short, I think there's more diverse and broad-based reasons for this to happen, reasons that are of interest to a lot of different players including Intel and AMD themselves, and getting to where this happens isn't as hard as some people make it sound. We're already a good part of the way there.

  17. Re:France and Germany now have to team up to compe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Even that will not be enough. In 10 years time or less China will buy off most of Germany's industry and with it the industrial core of Europe. The EU will enact laws upon laws to avoid that but they cannot fight the laws of economy and if the growing number of unemployed will not convince them, the rapid devaluation of the Euro will. Europeans will have to swallow their pride and accept being a Chinese protectorate. Which in the end is just history coming around. :)

  18. Re:Results would be buggier than open source softw by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 3, Interesting
    And you say this on what evidence?

    There may be no money in open source hardware NOW - but the argument is that so many people have now been shafted by closed source hardware that some might be interested in an alternative.

    No one is talking about "free as in beer".

    Someone who wants to break into the CPU market (can you say "Chinese") might want a sales pitch that can overcome their current image problems ("it might keep phoning home") - and open source is probably the ONLY tool that can crack that particular nut. And "It keeps phoning the mother ship" (or hackers.ru) is becoming a blunderbuss aimed deep into the heart of closed source. Meltdown and Spectre are "me, too" arguments in reality. You don't need bugs for closed source kit to be a security risk - you cannot tell if it is a security risk even in the absence of bugs. As any reliable and honest crook/casino owner will tell you: "if you can't tell if you are being cheated: you are being cheated".

    A lot of large customers buying expensive kit is a very valuable market. "Not being American" is potentially a massive potential selling point to the 90% of the world's population that is not American, but without open access to the design, very few will buy into a product from any of the potential alternative suppliers.

    However, I suspect what is really needed is not just open source, but also with a credible second source (eg from two different BRIC countries).

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  19. It's not time to reinvent the past by cardpuncher · · Score: 2
    RISC-V is just an instruction set architecture - and one that simply bundles up some well-established practice into a neater package. It offers nothing that a current processor cannot provide - with the exception of having an IPR-free instruction set. Which would at best a marginal gain because the first thing any of the mainstream chip vendors would do would be to "enhance" it with a bunch of proprietary instructions so they had a distinctive product.

    There's nothing in the spec about implementation - you're free to recreate Meltdown and Spectre and be fully compliant as far as I can tell - so I can see no benefit.

    What we are going to need going forwards - if we're serious about battling malicious software - are things like more protection rings (or similar) and hence faster mode-switching, better memory protection, container-oriented virtualisation (including better support for DMA), and possibly realising that we now have sufficient memory to run kernels mostly without address translation. That will probably involve some sort of Virtual Memory system in which an Address Space ID is part of the address for both cache efficiency and protection purposes. I don't think we'll get them, because it would involve significant changes, not to the silicon, but to the mindset of Operating System developers, most of whom seem to have been desperately reinventing Multics for the last 50 years.

    1. Re:It's not time to reinvent the past by Misagon · · Score: 1

      I like the way that The Mill architecture (proprietary, not yet in silicon) is going with regards of security features.

      It does some things in hardware fast that a microkernel would otherwise do with a penalty compared to current monolithic kernels. For instance, IPC is done through cross-domain calls in one clock cycle.
      This means that many libraries could be moved into separate protected domains ("services") without loss of performance.

      It also has fine-grained memory protection (separate from paging), akin to capabilities in hardware. It also has a separate protected stack for call return-addresses (and spilled register windows) and special encoding for branch-targets, thus being impervious to ROP or Return-to-libc attacks.

      While many of the specific mechanisms are patented, the general ideas are not - they are actually very old and have not been in the mainstream. Intel is getting a "shadow stack" for protecting against ROPs in future CPUs.

      BTW. Myself I am a little disappointed with RISC-V. It is clearly designed to run C very well but not anything else. There is no direct hardware support for carry/overflow detection, necessary for Swift and Rust as well as bignum libraries, meaning that those would run slower on it than on otherwise comparable architectures.

      --
      "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
    2. Re:It's not time to reinvent the past by KonoWatakushi · · Score: 1

      Slashdot largely seems to be missing the point of RISC-V. It isn't so much about having an open source processor, as an open specification that anyone can easily and freely implement and extend. The basic open designs are implemented in a high level design language and may be readily composed with a rich and growing selection of peripheral hardware in a flourishing ecosystem. The ISA itself is just a simple and elegant RISC, but the offer of escape from vendor lock-in or maintaining custom designs and toolchains is clearly very attractive to industry.

      Even so, while RISC-V will be great for embedded applications and running legacy operating systems with minimal change, no conventional architecture will ever really be safe in a network facing system. We need a much better architectural foundation to enable genuinely trustworthy and secure systems, or there will be no stemming the flood of vulnerabilities.

      The Mill Architecture is one prospect which promises very effective security mechanisms. Many common exploit vectors become impossible, and protection is flexible and virtually free, enabling the implementation of true micro-kernel based operating systems. There are many compelling aspects of the Mill, but it is not a trivial effort, and it will be a while for the hardware and ecosystem to develop, if it does while encumbered by patents. Meanwhile, it will remain a fascinating and inspiring curiosity which may be explored further under docs.

    3. Re:It's not time to reinvent the past by Misagon · · Score: 1

      Yes, overflow flags would complicate scheduling and speculation but not necessarily that much. The Mill sets a flag in "meta data" that belongs to the destination "register" and the flag is copied in subsequent instructions using that result. A CPU exception is trapped first when the flag reaches a non-speculated instruction such as a load or store.

      Overflow condition checking for a signed addition on RISC-V requires three additional instructions, with two linked dependencies. See here.

      --
      "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
  20. Yes. Long overdue. by Qbertino · · Score: 1

    Something neat and simple, like a raspberry SoC or something ... .. (Listen to me in 2018 ..."neat and simple, like a raspberry SoC" ... Isn't progress awesome!?)

    Back on track:
    we need this like now. When the 3d printers for electronics come about it should be trivial to print your type a FOSS smartphone model. IMHO.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:Yes. Long overdue. by gtall · · Score: 1

      Hmmm...I hear you. And as soon as we discover a pink unicorn, there will be world peace. We just need to find one. Should be a piece of cake and then there will be peace in our time.

  21. "would be no panacea" by CustomSolvers2 · · Score: 1

    I was about to invest all my money in this, but not being a panacea is quite off-putting. I guess that I will have to continue focusing on buying discount bridges and managing the overseas money of nice strangers who sporadically get in touch in me. LOL.

    On a more serious note, I am all for open-/community-based alternatives, but agree with some of the previous posters on this specific scenario being particularly difficult. Another option would be consumer pressure gradually forcing hardware manufacturers to be more open, although this seems quite difficult too.

    --
    Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
  22. Re: Results would be buggier than open source soft by Brockmire · · Score: 1

    It needs to be taken up by many universities from many countries. Tons of learning potential and enough volume to catch on.

  23. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  24. Unlike copyrights, patents expire. by tepples · · Score: 1

    You can't use an ARM instruction set without a license from ARM.

    As the ARM ISA overall has passed its twentieth birthday, and ARMv4 shapes up to follow suit very soon, which exclusive right would ARM assert?

    1. Re:Unlike copyrights, patents expire. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Have you looked at ARMv4? It lacks, for example, all atomic operations - you can't produce a multicore ARMv4 chip without some custom extensions (which you then need to support in toolchain parts that are mostly maintained by ARM employees, so good luck with that). It doesn't include an FPU. It doesn't include Thumb-2 (so your instruction density is going to suck). Add to that, LLVM doesn't support ARMv4 and I'm not sure GCC does anymore - if they do, don't expect it to be well tested, because even cheap embedded crap was ARMv5 and is moving to v6/v7.

      Early versions of ARM made a lot of decisions that are quite painful to implement with a modern microarchitecture. Examples include predicated everything (including loads and stores), which has fun interactions with dependencies, load and store multiple, which basically have to be done in microcode and have very exciting interactions with exceptions, and making the PC a general-purpose register (which means that every instruction is a potential branch until you've completely decoded it and know what the destination register is).

      Add on top of that the fact that the only conformance test suites for ARM are owned by ARM and are expensive to license. You're far better off starting with RISC-V than trying to implement an old version of a mainstream ISA.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  25. well then by sacrilicious · · Score: 1

    Here's some of the reasons that Corbet argues open souce hardware "would certainly offer some benefits, but it would be no panacea."

    Well, if it doesn't solve every problem 100%, then we're NOT FUCKING INTERESTED!!!
    We ONLY WANT PANACEAS.

    --
    - First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
  26. Re:France and Germany now have to team up to compe by Luthair · · Score: 2

    Eh? Germany already has a lot of tracks deployed, that 25000 km was China *catching up*, its also helpful that as an authoritarian regime they can pay next to nothing, ignore the environment and seize land for pennies.

    As far as exports, China's rail technology is effectively subsidized by the government, cheap labour, and lax labour laws.

  27. Re:Yes, but... Shakti-Pi ! by anon+mouse-cow-aard · · Score: 1
    The shakti stuff looks really interesting. The target is essentially an open source hardware version of a raspberry pi! That's great! If you want great market acceptance, built it to be physically compatible (board size, connector placement, pinouts) with a raspberry pi, and there will be good acceptance. It would be great if appliance makers would adopt the r-pi hw form-factor as a standard and have appliances that hooked into (relays and such) so that the main processor board was cheaper, more standard, and easier to interface with. Connected, yest, but also patchable, and also hackable home appliances. With the OS on an SD-CARD, one can get more assurances of security as well.

    *Appliances*, can be anything from a toaster, fridge, slow cooker, to a centrifuge ... it means a secure processor that can be used in industrial processes with more assurance as well, but with the development costs mostly underwritten by consumer market.

  28. It's not time to reinvent Western Digital. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Western Digital is suppose to be making a big push which isn't surprising when one considers all the processors just their hard drives use.

  29. Re:France and Germany now have to team up to compe by epine · · Score: 1

    Even that will not be enough. In 10 years time or less China will buy off most of Germany's industry and with it the industrial core of Europe.

    Should you possess advance information on the psychoactive chemicals the Chinese intend to introduce into the German water supply, the German government would surely pay good money to obtain that information before it happens—if it's not already too late.

  30. Essentially no by Darkness+Of+Course · · Score: 1

    The post rambled a bit, lost the thread once or twice. While he did make some interesting points but fell into the dreaded assumptions regarding fabs, processes, and availability at a price point that would be cost effective.

    No basic difference between last year and this. Not ready yet. Unless the world allows unbounded assumptions to reign supreme.

    I'll will track the progress but ARM has solved all my low level needs and I don't trust an earnest but unproven group with my future processors.

  31. Re:Results would be buggier than open source softw by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

    Chip dies are literally the kind of thing where once it's printed, it's impossible (not hard, impossible) to verify that your design made it into silicon untampered

    It's worth noting that this exact problem is currently the focus of a large DARPA-funded research project. The DoD is understandably nervous that even if they have complete RTL and formal verification that the RTL corresponds to the ISA (which is not currently feasible for nontrivial designs, but is probably less than a decade away), they have no idea if what they get back from the fab is really the same thing and they'd like to know.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  32. Re:France and Germany now have to team up to compe by Luthair · · Score: 1

    10-15 years ago China had no supercomputers on top 500, now they're #1 using their own chips.

    China now makes Intel Xeon processors?

  33. Re:France and Germany now have to team up to compe by stoatwblr · · Score: 1

    "as an authoritarian regime they can pay next to nothing, ignore the environment and seize land for pennies."

    Except they don't. That kind of stuff tends to be done by corrupt developers teaming up with local officials but the central government tends to do things "by the book" and they're cracking down on the corruption.

    Even without the chinese blowhard trolls extolling their virtues (They're much like USA blowhard trolls only chinese), the fact is that China's always been an advanced country with a good science base. It may have fallen behind over the last 100 years due to colonialism and not being able to surf the wave of the industrial revolution (not having easy access to the coalfields will do that) but it's caught up with most things over the last 40 years and gotten ahead in a few too - When low cost, safe reliable molten salt nuclear reactors start going into developing countries they'll be chinese and whilst western countries turn their noses up initially I can bet they'll buy them too.

    Similarly it's not a great stretch of the imagination to suggest that Russian railways will regauge to 4'8" (and china will pay for it) or that Europe will update its structure gauges to allow chinese goods trains to travel end-to-end without crossloading along the way (there's a secondary advantage that it would mean scandanavian/finnish trains will be able to travel beyond northern Germany) or that the trans-bering strait rail/road tunnel will be owned by the chinese (and US railways might well update structure gauges for the same reasons)