Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15400217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15400217 > I understand the ISA is open source, but SiF

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15400217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15400217 > I understand the ISA is open source, but SiFive does appear to be selling their IP. > > https://dev.sifive.com/coreplex-risc-v-ip/buy/ https://dev.sifive.com/coreplex-risc-v-ip/buy/ IIUC, SiFive is selling the ready-made "hard IP" [1], that means a compiled netlist that has been laid out at a slightly-abstract-but-almost-mask level. All this is manual work done on top of a netlist generated using the open-source Rocket chip generator [2,3] (SiFive people contribute to the upstream repository). Let's make a Wordpress analogy: SiFive is a big contributor to Wordpress and does most of the work upstream. At the same time they sell you preconfigured server images for your blog with Wordpress, nginx, varnish and postfix almost ready to go (few settings like IP, hostname and WP theme are still missing). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_intellectual_property_core#Hard_cores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_intellectual_pro... [2] https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/2014-rocket_chip.html https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/2014-rocket_chip.html [3] https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip