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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

Why would you use Intel products if you wanted to build an open-source handheld?

I'm looking forward to the not-very-distant day that we no longer need to use Intel products so that we can build open-source laptops.

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I just want to be able to call all the shots on the design of my product.

Intel has historically been very open on the desktop. Linux and computing in general wouldn't be where it is without that openness.

I suppose we have different ideas about what "open" means. In my view, Linux and computing in general have gotten where they are largely despite Intel's efforts at rent-extraction.

Wintel provided the mass market that enabled the economies of scale that drove down prices. Linux has piggybacked on that.

Linux was written for the 386....

If it wasn't for the likes of IBM and Intel, with Linux developers on their payroll, even though they also do lots of patents and closed source stuff, GNU would still be looking for a kernel.

> GNU would still be looking for a kernel.

Linux came about before there was commercial interest. Linux (or GNU/Linux if you will) would have existed. Whether it would be in the same place it is today is another story.

I was there. We just wanted to have a free UNIX clone at home, to be able to do the work from there instead of expensive connections over the phone line to corporate and university servers.

If that was all you wanted, you'd still be running MIMIX.

It would be great if RISC-V and other open CPU architectures dominate the CPU and SoC market, but that is going to be a long time coming. lowRISC seems to be the best chance for that.

http://www.lowrisc.org/

RISC-V seems to be lacking on the software side, e.g. where is the upstream support for Linux, GCC, or llvm? There is support in FreeBSD, but only because one of the FreeBSD committers was able to work on this full time (I've been providing advice to him as I ported FreeBSD to arm64 & have an office next to his).

I also have issues with the fact that many parts of the ISA are optional. A general purpose OS needs some common level of support by the hardware. If it can't rely on some features it makes it difficult to support the different SoCs.

IIRC there are ISA changes that need to be finalised before the support goes upstream. The support is already developed and available on github though.

Intel has the best documented GPU.

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