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Comment by chadzawistowski | Hacker News Reader

It's great to see free and open hardware finally arriving.

I've known of RISC-V for a while, and just learned of IBM's efforts to open up their Power Architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation

Does anyone know of any other free and open processor architectures? I hope we'll see a GPU one soon.

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Nyuzi open GPU focused on GPGPU programming: https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor

J Core is the opened version of SuperH, and thus already has good OS and compiler support: http://0pf.org/j-core.html

J Core is perhaps the main ‘competitor’ to RISC-V: they're both fully open, unencumbered, well-designed architectures suitable for both embedded devices and full systems.

RISC-V based GPUs (think: Xeon Phi / Knights Landing) is the current vogue for research in RISC-V space. A good chunk of the talks at the last RISC-V workshop were on this topic.

VERY unlikely you'll see an open GPU - they're all too worried about lawsuits because so much of their architectures are the same.

Sparc is also open and has been for quite some time.

That in of itself isn't true.

If you make GPUs like NVidia, AMD, and Intel do, you may be sued.

However, nothing stops you from just spamming extremely simple cores attached to a standardized bus architecture that talks to a singular extremely wide and fast memory controller.

Largely, this is slowly what GPUs are turning into.

Like this?

http://hwacha.org/

Yeah, that's a lot like what I'm thinking, or at least, they're going in the right direction.

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