Weekend Discussion: How Concerned Are You If Your CPU Is Completely Open?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Weekend Discussion: How Concerned Are You If Your CPU Is Completely Open?

For some interesting Sunday debates in the forums, how important to you is having a completely open CPU design? Additionally, is POWER dead? This comes following interesting remarks by an industry leader this weekend...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...CPU-Importance

[rene]

hardware and CPUs should be open for the many reasons we prefer open source, fixing bugs, security, making changes, innovation you name it. And yes PowerPC is dead, it was never that great, and the more modern AND OPEN RISCV will dominate the near and mid term future ;-) And in the wake of all the Intel & co CPU bugs, who would not want a truly open, verifiably and fixable CPU design? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAIqjlJ-aFc

[Jabberwocky]

how concerned are you to the level of transparency into the inner-workings of the processors?

I don't trust security through obscurity. My concern is the inverse of transparency.

[tildearrow]

I am pretty sure I know who is greatly concerned. It's uid.


Wait wait wait, "is POWER dead"? Really? I do not think it is...

[rene]

hardware and CPUs should be open for the many reasons we prefer open source, fixing bugs, security, making changes, innovation you name it. And yes PowerPC is dead, it was never that great, and the more modern AND OPEN RISCV will dominate the near and mid term future ;-) And in the wake of all the Intel & co CPU bugs, who would not want a truly open, verifiably and fixable CPU design? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAIqjlJ-aFc

[elatllat]

I'd pay double for something completely open.

[paulpach]

Personally, If I have to use the thing on a daily basis (my laptop or phone), I want the fastest thing I can get for my money. As long as I can write software for it (I am a developer). If the fastest thing happens to be open, awesome, but if not then it does not make a difference day to day.

It would be a different story if the laptop came with a FPGA chip along side the regular CPU and GPU. Then open designs would be really useful, I could program my FPGA as a power core or RISC-V core and try it out. I could experiment with VLIW or EDGE architectures. I could hardware accelerate some particular code that I am working on. If I can download and execute a processor design with ease, then it would be a game changer for open CPU designs.

[Termy]

i wouldn't want to sacrifice too much performance for "open", but i would be willing to pay considerably more for a CPU/System i could trust has no backdoors/undocumented registers and so on. And to achieve that trust, being open is pretty much the only way.

[R41N3R]

I think and open CPU is getting more and more important. In the past performance was maybe the only thing that mattered, but we now live in a time where trusted computing is just a dream and everybody spies on you, private companies and governments; laws are made nowadays to legalize this instead of protecting the rights of human beings.
Even if you install and run only open source software, your system cannot be trusted as there is the AMD PSP, Intel ME and other firmware blobs that cannot be audited at all. I would love to get a fully open system but so far the price just hold me back, the entry level shouldn't be that high to attract more users!

Nuvia just tries to make some self marketing here, but in the end they will sell the same ARM stuff like everybody else. Maybe it is time for them to acknowledge that there is no need for just another ARM CPU ;-)

[pal666]

completely open as in "i can tweak it and build new one for same price" ? i can dream, can't i?

hardware and CPUs should be open for the many reasons we prefer open source, fixing bugs, security, making changes, innovation you name it

lol, some people actually live in a dream