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Comment by oretoz | Hacker News Reader

RISC-V is a general puspose CPU architecture. Does something exist which is open like RISC-V but for DSPs? I am asking because unless we have that, no smartphone can be truly open and infact you can argue that it is what runs in baseband that needs to be open rather than on the main CPU.

Ofcourse RISC-V is an architecture so not just applicable for smartphones but the point remains. RISC-V solves half the problem but what about the other half i.e. DSPs?

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>> RISC-V solves half the problem but what about the other half i.e. DSPs?

One thing at a time. I'd argue that graphics is still a huge hole in the open hardware world. There are lots of things to be done.

Is there something on the horizon for graphics and GPU?

>> Is there something on the horizon for graphics and GPU?

There is the MIAOW open source GPU but it is based on an AMD instruction set, so it's probably not viable for general use.

I believe in the short term the solution will be simply running LLVM-Pipe on a bunch of RISC-V cores for software rendering. The SoCs will just have frame buffer graphics. Another option is to have PCIe support (which HiFive is going to) so you could at least recompile an open source driver for a proprietary video card. I suspect that once RISC-V SoCs are running a full linux distribution with one of these inferior graphics solutions then people will jump in to make better open graphics hardware.

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