'Is It Time For Open Processors?' (lwn.net) 179
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."
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."
No chance of becoming mainstream (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.
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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.
Re:No chance of becoming mainstream (Score:5, 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.
Re:No chance of becoming mainstream (Score:4, 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.
Re:No chance of becoming mainstream (Score:5, Interesting)
I also think something like this has some value in education even if it doesn't do much commercially.
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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.
What is needed is to get critical mass. However, this may not be as hard as people think. One can bring up the Intel ME debacle, and show that this chipset is open from design to the masking process to the fab... and companies will buy those, if only to ensure that the C-level PCs are not compromised, one of the few places where security tends to be valued.
T
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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".
Re: No chance of becoming mainstream (Score:2)
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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.
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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
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Sorry, but nope. Not even the spooky magic of entanglement can transmit information instantly, though it is useful for a few other things.
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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.
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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.
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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)
Re: No chance of becoming mainstream (Score:2)
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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 th
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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.
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But it did. Further, WD has plans [designnews.com] to use RISC-V cores in future products.
Unlike copyrights, patents expire. (Score:2)
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?
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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 chea
Yes, but... (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 [boingboing.net], "Civil War" by Cory Doctorow [boingboing.net], and "On The War On General Purpose Computing" by Jon Evans [techcrunch.com].
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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.
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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).
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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
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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 pr
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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 t
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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.
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China has the CPU future (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... [reddit.com]
Zhaoxin launched KX-5000 quad/octa-core x86 processors on Dec 28, 2017 in Shanghai, China: image [semidata.info], report [eefocus.com], translation [google.com].
Zhaoxin revealed KX-6000 & KX-7000 roadmap: image [semi.org.cn], report [semi.org.cn], translation [google.com].
Other reports
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http://store.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
All China has to do is be in that CPU speed range for desktop games at a much lower cost every generation.
You're a fucking business moron. (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.
France and Germany now have to team up to compete (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... [dw.com]
Chinese train technology rolls into Germany
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/w... [chinadaily.com.cn]
China is on track to build high-speed rail in just about every corner of the world
https://qz.com/292321/china-is... [qz.com]
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... [cnn.com]
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."
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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.
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"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 sc
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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... 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 Al
Re:Yes, but... Shakti-Pi ! (Score:2)
Modern process fab cost is prohibitive (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. (Score:2)
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 fa
Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. (Score:5, 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.
Re:Sawmills, steel mills, and fabs. (Score:5, 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.)
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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
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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.
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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 - ca
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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.
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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.
work with the military (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.
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DoD funds a lot of work that is let out to general industry, stop talking like it is closed shop.
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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".
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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
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A RISC-V would be kickin' rad (Score:2)
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 i
Open Motorola 68000 series? (Score:4, 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.
Re:Open Motorola 68000 series? (Score:4, 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.
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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.
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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).
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looking particulary at ARM much more powerfull ideas, like every instruction can be conditional.
arm64 got rid of this.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Yeah, thanks for the info, I just read up a bit about Aarm64 ... The amount of 'architectures' is quite confusing :)
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You mean like this one [opencores.org]? The problem with emulating a 68k is that the best kind of performance you can hope for is enough to make a fast amiga [apollo-core.com]. 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 ac
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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 archit
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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/ [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/ [apollo-core.com]
I want OpenARM (Score:2)
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.
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A nonstarter, or a Herculean effort (Score:3, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
It's not time to reinvent the past (Score:3)
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.
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I like the way that The Mill [slashdot.org] 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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
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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 toolc
Yes. Long overdue. (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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well then (Score:2)
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.
Re: (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.
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Did you ever think that the person who can't be amused easily is the boring one?
Re:Results would be buggier than open source softw (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Re: Results would be buggier than open source soft (Score:2)
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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.