5 ms·
>High performance microarchitecture costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Someone may develop competitive RISC-V CPU someday but it will not have op
by solomatov 9y ago
>High performance microarchitecture costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Someone may develop competitive RISC-V CPU someday but it will not have open microarchitecture. AMD and Nvidia are examples of fabless companies who develop and sell proprietary microarchitectures. Thinking that someone develops open platform that competes with them is not realistic.
I am sure that they same argument should have worked for OSes 30 years ago. I think it will go the same way as it was with linux but much faster. There're a lot of small and not so small players who aren't able to develop microarchitecture themselves but quite eager to take their part in open source project.
- tfha 9y agoI'm not sure that works as well for hardware. Every fab is different. Imagine if you had to rewrite the whole Linux kernel for every CPU on the market. Getting high performance requires tuning carefully to the exact fab, and fabs change and upgrade on like a two year cycle. To the best of my knowledge there's no equivalent to the C language for fabs. You have to port the whole chip every time
- solomatov 9y agoThe same argument can be applied to the hardware. We have a lot of different hardware, it's all different, and every pice of hardware needs its own driver. In practice, drivers are created by hardware vendors and often they are open source. Of course, production processes are more complicated than this, but there's a degree of decoupling of the processor together with its architecture from the production process.