Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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> I would like to be proven wrong, so if there is some IC experts who can explain the business case where someone invests $300-$500M to develop new top notch open source microarchitecture (patent free?) every 5-10 years that can compete with Intel, AMD and others, I would like to see it.

To develop an open-motherboard marketplace where code can be shared openly between motherboard designers. Or maybe even "daughterboard" features.

You know, like OpenPower / Power9. Where additional boot-level capabilities (ie: OpenBMC) are open source and standardized and documented.

https://openpowerfoundation.org/presentations/openbmc-a-refe...

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A practical use of this, is to have the BMCs of servers report status (IE: power, temperature, etc. etc.) in a secure, open, and extendable way. BMCs also have the ability to act as a remote terminal, such as a serial-over-ethernet port. These sorts of features have security concerns that Open Source / openly-vetted code would at least make some people feel better.

We're talking about a component that has the ability to remotely reboot, remotely attach keyboards / mice, and virtual terminals at the hardware level. So yeah, security is pretty important.

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Consider this article as why people want Coreboot / Open Source boots: https://www.raptorengineering.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-bmc-port...

If you can't trust the bootup procedure of your computer, then you can't trust the computer at all!

All of what you describe are not done, or guaranteed, by RISC-V. RISC-V only refers to the CPU cores, the same way Arm refers to the CPUs as well.

Actually, Arm cores don't force any kind of proprietary board architectures or binary blobs in order to be manufactured and shipped. Why do people expect that this will change with RISC-V?

And that's all this article is bringing attention to.

Some people care about open-source, and they care quite strongly. I'm not necessarily part of open-boot or coreboot... but I at least understand their sentiment.

For these OSS advocates, they really believe in controlling the full computer with fully open source hardware. They feel like calling RISC-V an "Open Source" core dillutes the term.

At the end of the day, its just a blogpost on a popular OSS benchmarking website dedicated to the server market. RISC-V doesn't serve their purposes (yet), so that's all they're writing about.

99% of the Phoronix content is about Linux Benchmarks btw. So its not like they publish these internet politics issues too often.

RISC-V is just an ISA but the foundation and all the people who have bought in have given some political power and dynamism into the movement that it didn't have before.

Just the amount of people meeting and starting to work together on some of these issue makes RISC-V valuable.

Its adoption in research will also lead to some nice stuff (and already has).

So I agree with your core point but we when talking about RISC-V we should think about it more broadly.

Intel and AMD already provide most of the necessary code to motherboard manufacturers. Why would a motherboard manufacturer want to share their code with their competitors?

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