7 ms·
Backers of Open-Source Chips Launch Startup
- pella 10y agohttps://www.sifive.com/ https://www.sifive.com/ https://www.sifive.com/about/press/ https://www.sifive.com/about/press/
- pella 10y agoor http://www.anandtech.com/show/10488/sifive-unveils-freedom-platforms-for-riscvbased-semicustom-chips http://www.anandtech.com/show/10488/sifive-unveils-freedom-p...
- lifeisstillgood 10y agoI recently looked into buying a new laptop, and found minifree.org, who supply libreboot BIOS chips. What astounded me was that Intel post 2008 and AMD post 2011 have seperate management chips that mean essentially any motherboard is rooted at the start. I still need to dive into the complexities (I knew about Intel ME but assumed we could get round it somehow) but we need these open chips more than ever.
- yuhong 10y agoAFAIK AMD PSP don't have access to the network unlike Intel ME. Intel AMT is actually a useful feature for some large organizations.
- jordigh 10y agoThe NSA is a pretty large organisation, yes.
- throwaway7767 10y agoAMD PSP has access to all the hardware in your machine. Now, whether the software running on it has drivers to control your ethernet hardware is another question, but if you could answer that, there wouldn't be a trust issue with these kinds of binary blobs.
- Kinnard 10y agoI wonder if open-sourcing can help keep Moore's Law going.
- niftich 10y agoDoubtful. If the companies with multi-billion dollar IP, talent and fabs are having trouble making chips archive the same level of performance-increases every 18 months as they did in the past, sharing only the IP (and not Intel's, but that of a smaller player) still leaves several problems unsolved. But it's still an effort to share knowledge, which is good.
- Kinnard 10y agoI imagine this allows for crowdsourcing and who knows how many ideas are out there. Sort of like Gauss Method for the sum of a series.
- ansible 10y agoNo, that's not going to help. Moore's Law is about transistor density, and RISC-V is still dependant on the same silicon process technology the existing architecture are. We may see some improvement in performance due to the new architecture, and maybe even more so with the Mill CPU architecture. But the end of the road for silicon lithography already in sight, and these new architectures won't fix that.
- chillingeffect 10y agoMoore's law is abt # of transistors, not density [1]. But I still see no reason open-sourcing would boost it. It's a capital-intensive process which is not where open source shines and is typically limited. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law# https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#
- svens_ 10y agoThose two go hand in hand. You can't increase area arbitrarily. The more area your chip has, the less yield you get, which in turn makes it uneconomical to produce. The reason is simple, even a single manufacturing fault can make a chip unusable. If you assume e.g. a fixed number of faults per wafer, you can easily see how increasing the chip area increases the area you have to throw away for every fault. As you wrote, the semiconductor business is very capital intensive, so no one can afford to do that (except for some niche applications, like R&D, space, etc.).
- kumarski 10y agorelevant: http://efabless.com http://efabless.com