Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chongli 3701 days ago
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/
2 comments
eropple 3701 days ago
"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?

link
chongli 3701 days ago
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.

link
bsder 3701 days ago
> 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?

link