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I'm not sure about this - there are many open processor designs in academia if a fb/google wanted to pick them up - the difficulty is integration and software.

by verall 7y ago

I'm not sure about this - there are many open processor designs in academia if a fb/google wanted to pick them up - the difficulty is integration and software. They could easier just work on ARM, the reference designs are available if you are fb or google. I guess what I'm saying is, even if a reletively modern, 2-issue, OoO, with SMT and 256b vector proc, came out open source, would anybody really bother to integrate it and fab it? From what I see fb and Google work with silicon vendors because they don't want be silicon vendors.

andyjpb 7y ago
Google have been experimenting with POWER in their datacenters for a while now: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/headed-into-its-fifth-year-openpower-has-momentum-into-the-power9-generation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head... More historically, Google have been building their own networking gear for some time https://www.wired.com/2015/06/google-reveals-secret-gear-connects-online-empire/ https://www.wired.com/2015/06/google-reveals-secret-gear-con... I'm focussing on Google in particular because they have always had a strong preference for Open components wherever possible and they've traditionally taken advantage that openness wherever they think they need to even if that goes against common practice. (There's a story I can't find the link to where, in the very early days, they wrote their own patches to Linux to work around some bad RAM chips that they'd scavenged from somewhere.) If Google can get an advantage then they will take it. They will also invest heavily, over years, to research these advantages and opportunities. Their attitude to things like ARM is still fairly accurate at the scale of their datacenters: https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf

by verall 7y ago

andyjpb 7y ago

Google have been experimenting with POWER in their datacenters for a while now: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/headed-into-its-fifth-year-openpower-has-momentum-into-the-power9-generation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head... More historically, Google have been building their own networking gear for some time https://www.wired.com/2015/06/google-reveals-secret-gear-connects-online-empire/ https://www.wired.com/2015/06/google-reveals-secret-gear-con... I'm focussing on Google in particular because they have always had a strong preference for Open components wherever possible and they've traditionally taken advantage that openness wherever they think they need to even if that goes against common practice. (There's a story I can't find the link to where, in the very early days, they wrote their own patches to Linux to work around some bad RAM chips that they'd scavenged from somewhere.) If Google can get an advantage then they will take it. They will also invest heavily, over years, to research these advantages and opportunities. Their attitude to things like ARM is still fairly accurate at the scale of their datacenters: https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf