3 ms·

Yeah, working in the SoC industry (closer to the silicon side), I'm regularly frustrated at the gulf between the state of the art and what's usefully available

Yeah, working in the SoC industry (closer to the silicon side), I'm regularly frustrated at the gulf between the state of the art and what's usefully available to the public. I'd love to have a multi-core ARM64 with integrated PCIe, SATA (NVMe!), USB3, IOMMUs, maybe a few Cortex-Rs around for some real-time/MCU-type work with GPIOs and stuff... All of which I've seen and worked on in the industry. But none of that is open to the public :(

tw04 10y ago
So serious question since you worj in the industry. Given the amount of time, energy, and money that would go into that design - if it were completely open source, what would prevent some Chinese firm coming along and making a knockoff for half the price?
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  Having the register specs and behavior of the various blocks inside the chip is a lot like having the API of a library. It lets you use it, but doesn't tell you how it's implemented internally, which is where most of the secret sauce happens. This register/spec is what a lot of people like me wish for. There are two levels of "open source" for hardware: the first is where the registers and behavior are documented, allowing programmers to write their own drivers for the hardware, but for moderately complex stuff doesn't get you far for copying it. The second level is where the implementation details of the chip (the Verilog or VHDL description of its behavior) are open-sourced. Only the latter would let you "easily" create a knockoff, and even that isn't within reach of any household hacker, as the base cost of fabbing a chip is still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but yeah that would be within reach of an undercutting competitor. (there's even a third layer of open source where the Verilog/VHDL is turned into the final layout tuned for the fab, think of it like having the source-code vs the final assembly for a given architecture. That step is costly too)
- deleted 10y ago
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tw04 10y ago

So serious question since you worj in the industry. Given the amount of time, energy, and money that would go into that design - if it were completely open source, what would prevent some Chinese firm coming along and making a knockoff for half the price?

AceJohnny2 10y ago
Having the register specs and behavior of the various blocks inside the chip is a lot like having the API of a library. It lets you use it, but doesn't tell you how it's implemented internally, which is where most of the secret sauce happens. This register/spec is what a lot of people like me wish for. There are two levels of "open source" for hardware: the first is where the registers and behavior are documented, allowing programmers to write their own drivers for the hardware, but for moderately complex stuff doesn't get you far for copying it. The second level is where the implementation details of the chip (the Verilog or VHDL description of its behavior) are open-sourced. Only the latter would let you "easily" create a knockoff, and even that isn't within reach of any household hacker, as the base cost of fabbing a chip is still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but yeah that would be within reach of an undercutting competitor. (there's even a third layer of open source where the Verilog/VHDL is turned into the final layout tuned for the fab, think of it like having the source-code vs the final assembly for a given architecture. That step is costly too)
deleted 10y ago
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