Open source hardware

I've been reading some of the threads about the GPL, and binary-only drivers, and I'm suprised that nobody has brought up open source hardware, (or rather, the lack of it).

Open source hardware more or less sidesteps the whole issue of closed-source drivers - an open source driver would be so easy to write with all the specifications available that there would be very little point in writing a closed-source driver.

At the moment there is not very much open source hardware, and what does exist is generally peripherals, and not things like CPUs, but I expect this will change soon, mainly because it would be easy to develop a cheap, and simple CPU that is designed for multi-processor use from the beginning.

This means that each CPU would be cheap and easy to produce, (simple design = high yeild from each wafer, and mass production = low cost per unit). Typical machines would have several orders of magnitude more processors than those of conventional design, (E.G. 4 to 16 for a desktop), but they would be far cheaper, because anybody would be free to fabricate the CPUs.

So, basically, the idea is to design a low-cost, low-computational-power CPU, which works well in multi-processor configurations, and make the specification open source. Anybody could make the processors, and building a machine of a given computational power would be cheaper using them than using conventional CPUs.

I personally expect to see this within 10 years.

John.

[...]

You're behind the times :)

http://www.opencores.org/

Interesting - I'd only seen open source CPU projects which were at the planning stage.

It seems that most of the components necessary to build a usable machine are at least well-advanced, although most of the non-CPU parts are based around the WISHBONE interface, whereare most of the CPUs are not, so maybe the goal is further away than it first appears, but still, progress is being made.

Do you know of anybody who has actually made a prototype board from any of these CPU designs? Is my idea of running a lot of simple CPUs together fundamentally flawed, or is it possible to overcome the inefficiencies of SMP, if the CPUs are designed for it from the ground up?

To be honest I am really begining to get bored with i386-based systems, and I'm hoping to move away from them entirely at the earliest opportunity. Hopefully I'll be building my next machine around an UltraSPARC, but I've really been a bit too busy with other projects lately...

John.

The fundamental problem is not inefficiencies of SMP. But rather there are some tasks that simply do not parallelize well. Big supercomputer kinds of applications that require a lot of number crunching usually benefit from multiple cpus. But small every day applications don't. The only applications that scale perfectly with the number of cpus are the embarrassingly parallel ones, in which no communication is involved between the various subtasks.

This is not to say an elegant design might not get there, AMD is trying for that. But simple brute force will certainly not get you there.

Eric

www.opencores.org

Hmm, cpu design is never simple, that is why big companies pay huge money to highly educated professionals to work for them in designing CPUs.

Cheap, simple CPUs, and multiple of those? Like transputers? Ohw, those were not that simple it turned out, they were designed ground up to work in multiprocessor environments. They were not that relyable either, about 1 in 17 would for some reason not work after a power-down, luckily, it was not determined which one that would be, hot spare CPU's were the answer. ;-)

I personally expect not to see this in the next 10 years. Nobody bothers to build smp 68040 boxes currently, this is a cheap (relatively), easy to use, multiprocessor capable cpu. Why not? well, on big PPC is a lot easier on the hardware, a lot faster and in the end, a lot cheaper.

Oh, BTW remember the Apple ][? One could get all hardware docs for that bocs, schematics for the entire circuit, the works. That made it very easy to build clones, and some people did that, turned out, those were not much cheaper that apple's original box....

Met vriendelijke groeten,

Remco Post

SARA - Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam    http://www.sara.nl
High Performance Computing  Tel. +31 20 592 8008    Fax. +31 20 668 3167

"I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer
industry. Not that that tells us very much of course - the computer industry
didn't even foresee that the century was going to end." -- Douglas Adams

Yeah, the docs were on fold-out sheets at the back of the manual! I think I even had schematics for the floppy disk controllers. the Apple ][ was a really nice machine - I remember I had, (infact, still have, although I haven't powered it on for around 10 years!), the following peripherals in mine:

Slot 0 - Language card
Slot 1 - 16K RAM card
Slot 2 - Empty
Slot 3 - Z80 processor
Slot 4 - Third disk controller
Slot 5 - Second disk controller
Slot 6 - First disk controller
Slot 7 - PAL encoder

I only had four floppy drives, so the third disk controller was never used. I didn't have an 80-column card, nor a serial interface :-(, but I did have *** 96K *** of RAM!!! Truely the power of a mainframe on the desktop... Almost.

John.