System76 Comments On Their Open-Source Hardware Plans & US Manufacturing

[wizard69]

It it is very hard to call China communist these days. It is more of an unregulated capitalist society governed by a dictatorship.

That is wishful thinking. While china is a communist nation, seems like it would be more friendly towards open source... The people who run the companies, their capitalists, are even greedier than the ones in western countries.

It's a very natural way of thinking that you won't be able to compete with other companies if they can read every detail of your designs freely while you can't do the same for theirs.

probably because it is true. Take AMD for example if they had opened up their hardware designs for their GPUs they wouldn’t have lasted a year. The competition would have had dozens of chips available all offering what AMD offered. Mean while AMD would be laying off people and be getting ready to close due to lack of income.

You may may laugh but competition sucks. In this industry consider where Digital Equipment, Data General, Prime, Sun, Apollo, Amiga, Zenith, Tandem, Wang and likely hundreds more, are these days. Now none of these died of open hardware what they died from is competition that did something faster and cheaper. With China’s unfair and one way policies a company that releases a hardware design for a chip would’ve wiped out within a year.

There is a huge difference between the software as a service dealing of the free software world versus the hardware world. There is no capital to speak of with open software. FOSS developers are being paid for their knowledge not the software persay. With software you can actually benefit from somebody else using and improving. With hardware, if somebody uses your design you loose your shirt. Massive difference.

[c117152]

That is wishful thinking. While china is a communist nation, seems like it would be more friendly towards open source... The people who run the companies, their capitalists, are even greedier than the ones in western countries.

It's a very natural way of thinking that you won't be able to compete with other companies if they can read every detail of your designs freely while you can't do the same for theirs.

Actually I was thinking more towards them receiving government grants to (loss?) lead out of reliance on US IP. Currently they're doing the same with memory fabs and are trying to do something similar with AR/VR, AI and vehicular computing (ASIC) since they want their self-driving cars locally made. GPUs are part of the AR/VR package and, like you said, are very unlikely to happen without a large investment and lots of engineers. So, given time, they might conclude the same (i.e. fail) and decide to patent pool and open source the effort across the automobile industry.

The current adaptation of RISC-V followed a similar course with them failing to produce local compute cores so they settled on open source.

Honestly it's not even exclusive to China. India and Europe are similarly trying to keep their vehicular industries independent from foreign IP by developing local fabless and fabs. It just happened that I recently read about those Chinese GPU startups. I know for a fact the EU commission already formed a patent pool for datacenters and vehicular computing technologies and India are designing a RISC-V family to compete against the x86 family at all workloads. But I haven't heard anything specific about them doing any GPU stuff so...

Oh, the 2-3years isn't how long it will take to develop anything. It's how long the Chinese will wait and see regarding US foreign policies and Trump. Another 4 years or another politician that still follows his protectionist foreign policies will force their (and the other powers) hands to develop their own.

So, wait and see

[Guest]

Not gonna happen. Not gonna happen either, also where is ARM getting powerful? It's still struggling in anything beyond low-end laptops.

What? Look at the benchmarks. The new iPhone has the same scores as the Dell XPS 13. In fact, its single core score is slightly higher. Look here and here.

[ldesnogu]

Heh, what I read was that its singlecore performance was somewhat close to the single-core performance of a Xeon 8176 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392...icon-secrets/4
which is a Xeon with like 28 cores, 56 threads and can be mounted on boards with 4 CPUs (i.e. it is designed for parallel loads, not single-core).

And they claimed "desktop performance", no that's still low-end. A desktop CPU from Intel has much more IPC than a server CPU with 28 cores.

Why comparing a server or a desktop chip with a chip that's in a phone or a tablet? Apple A12 and especially A12X are close in performance to higher end Kaby Lake R found in laptops.

The "pure feasibility perspective" should also deal with the annoyance of transitioning all their current x86 ecosystem to ARM, which is not really a fun thing.

That ecosystem could move, Apple have done it twice already. But Bootcamp (used to run the game OS aka Windows) would be an issue that could make some people move away from Mac.

And to get back on topic, I find that System 76 machine completely uninteresting. Not fully open, and nothing really new.