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Quite a bit! Look at all the places Linux ended up. Servers, phones, embedded systems, etc. The freedom to modify and tinker encourages innovation. The cost
by lallysingh 8y ago
Quite a bit! Look at all the places Linux ended up. Servers, phones, embedded systems, etc. The freedom to modify and tinker encourages innovation. The cost encourages cheap experimentation.
- dragontamer 8y agoThe difference is that most of us don't own million-dollar fabrication labs. At best, we would be tinkering with FPGAs with custom cores, but FPGAs are an order-of-magnitude slower than traditional CPU ASICs. So we the typical user can't make use of open source designs. ------ An open source "conglomerate" of companies may work. But I haven't fully thought about the economics of it.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoLinux is funded by billion dollar companies (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/), and it is put into phones & cloud servers by billion dollar companies.
- dragontamer 8y agoHow many of those billion dollar companies own a fab? Realistically, only Samsung, Intel, and TSMC can make next-generation chips. (Global Foundries just quit the 7nm race. They're going to be stuck at 12nm). Intel is fully proprietary tech, so that leaves Samsung and TSMC as the only companies that make chips for other companies. At the end of the day, an open-source chip isn't really much benefit when there are only two manufacturers of chips.
- jdsully 8y agoIntel actually does do contract fab work - they just happen to be really bad at it so they don't get much business. But there is a long tail of chip-making at older nodes to reduce cost, and for analogue integration. Risc-V is getting its start here. I hope we'll see a practical desktop version at some point, but that's not necessary for Risc-V to win.
- thesz 8y agoTSMC is fab-only. It does not compete with its clients who produce chips. Thus anyone with a contract with TSMC can be a chip producer.
- abfan1127 8y agoI think the open source hardware has more appeal in that end-users can "audit" their hardware... I'm not sure how true it is, but that's the idea...
- erk__ 8y agoMaybe a bit like the OpenPOWER project?
- dragontamer 8y agoYeah, but its a bad example. Because OpenPOWER doesn't need an open-source chip to function. POWER9 is still owned and controlled by IBM. OpenPOWER is basically a set of documents and specifications that is analogous to IBM's original "PC" specification. This is good for sure, but it doesn't mean that POWER9 is open source like RISC-V is. If anything, I think OpenPOWER is a good example of why an open-source chip is unnecessary. It shows that a group of companies can work together and build a major platform without the need of open sourcing the chip. I'm unsure what RISC-V gains above and beyond the OpenPOWER consortium.
- jes5199 8y agoquite a bit of open source software is maintained and consumed by megacorps nowadays - like, OSS really does become a way for conglomerates of companies to share tech (when the alternative is monopoly-supplied monocultures, it makes a lot of sense). The hardware world seems analogous to what the software world was like in the 90s - a small number of proprietary platforms.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]