[chongli]

What we really need is a project to do for GPUs what RISC-V[0] is about to do for CPUs. It's high time we as a society broke away from the stranglehold proprietary companies such as Nvidia and Intel have over us. It's time for a completely open computing platform for all of us to use to the fullest advantage of society.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V

[eropple]

That sounds great. Are you going to pay for it?

That isn't an attempt at snark--RISC-V is interesting. It isn't competitive. GPU technology is very interesting. This, without dump trucks of cash, won't be competitive, either.

There is a question of cui bono here, and you need to answer that to make what you advocate make sense.

[chongli]

dump trucks of cash

How about $30,000[0]? Seriously, it's not the 90s anymore. The cost of making a chip is not insane and it's going to go down every year. As Moore's Law slows to a halt, we enter the golden age of computer architecture[1].

[0] http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1327291

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD-njD2QKN0

[eropple]

The cost of making a chip anybody wants to use is not $30,000, though. nVidia gets my money because their GPU technology is good enough to, at a reasonable price point, do absolutely anything I'm likely to encounter in the next 3-5 years. You're fighting against significant economies of scale as well as a significant technical deficit.

Don't get me wrong: it would be awesome if this existed. But I think that, like RISC-V, it's predicated on a heavy hitter getting something significant out of doing it. I'm not sure who will do that without the ROI in play.

[chongli]

I agree that you're not soon likely to replace your shiny $400 Nvidia graphics card with something designed by a bunch of students and faculty at Berkeley. However, what about your phone? If you watch Prof Patterson's talk, you'll be astounded at what they've been able to do with modern tools and a small team of students. Now think of some larger, slightly-more funded teams such as LowRISC[0] and you begin to see the possibilities. Raspberry Pi proved there is demand for this sort of thing.

[0] http://www.lowrisc.org/

[eropple]

"It's open" is not and has never been an effective selling point for consumer products, and it seems that you're effectively trying to sell these things to consumers. "It's open and is better is," and in my experience that rarely exists (again, for consumer products). If it is as easy as you posit (and this isn't my field, I know a little about CPUs and GPUs but mobile isn't really relevant to me), then what's stopping a company with significant talent and cash reserves can appropriate the same approaches and lap you with their closed tech? I don't see how you're not going to have to offer an inferior good at superior-good prices.

Technically speaking, if anything, phones strike me as a harder place to enter, due to the limitations on power budget and the significant premium on marginal performance. I'm not saying it can't be built--I'm saying, who would both want it and not benefit from business-as-usual, closed development?

[chongli]

The equation is the same one as for software: why did Google use the Linux kernel instead of developing their own kernel for Android? Because Linux is available and free to use; duplicating the effort of Linux would not have been worth it at all.

The RISC-V architecture is superior to all of the major commercial architectures out there. It's also free to use and has a significant amount of headroom for private extension. So what's stopping a company like Apple from using it for their next phone? They already have the necessary human resources to design an SoC. The main barrier is software recompilation. Well, the RISC-V target is specifically designed to be easy to recompile to: it's not in any way a radical departure from the common ideas out there.

[bsder]

> Raspberry Pi proved there is demand for this sort of thing.

RPi proved nothing of the sort. You are still relying on a commercial vendor to provide the VLSI chips. And, I assure you, they didn't make that chip for the RPi.

Open chips for phones? I couldn't stop laughing. Phones are all about minimizing power consumption. That requires that you be on nearly the newest fab technology.

If OpenRISC/LowRISC/<foo>RISC were serious, they've got a really good market to jam themselves into--Bluetooth Low Energy and WiFi chips. The margins on those chips have gotten so small that everybody is doing anything to avoid having to pay ARM money.

So, why aren't those chip vendors adopting the "open" stuff instead of hand-rolling their own?