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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>I really hate it that big companies are rolling their own CPU now. Soon, you're not a serious developer if you don't have your own CPU. And everybody is stuck in some walled garden.

It is still just ARM. You can buy ARM chip everywhere. There is no walled garden.

> Shouldn't we have separate CPU companies, so that everybody can benefit from progress,

You are benefiting the same CPU design from ARM, and same Fab improvement from TSMC. Amortised across the whole industry. Doesn't get any better than that.

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> It is still just ARM. You can buy ARM chip everywhere.

Only large companies can build CPUs based on ARM. Also, now companies might rely on everything in vanilla ARM, but soon they will be adding parts of their own ISA, improvements to the memory hierarchy, a GPU, or perhaps even their own management engine to keep an eye on things or to keep things locked down.

> There is no walled garden.

There is huge potential for walled gardens, just look at Apple.

>Only large companies can build CPUs based on ARM....

Only large companies can build any modern CPUs.

> improvements to the memory hierarchy, a GPU, or perhaps even their own management engine

None of these has anything to do with ISA nor ARM. As a matter of fact adding any of these does not contribute to lock in. They are ( potentially ) fragmentation in terms of optimisation requirement.

If I am inferring correctly, the only thing that wouldn't count as locked down and walled garden by your definition would be a total open source design from Hardware to Software.

> If I am inferring correctly, the only thing that wouldn't count as locked down and walled garden by your definition would be a total open source design from Hardware to Software.

No. I'm totally fine with CPUs with fully open documentation and preferably designed by a company that specializes in CPUs. Open documentation + liberal license should allow other CPU manufacturers to compete based on the same ISA.

What I don't want is involvement of the vendor after I have bought my CPU (other than updates), or any kind of lock-in or dominance of one vendor for my ISA or dark patterns. Or drivers/updates that only work on a specific OS and thus are unusable if I decide to write my own OS for the CPU. Updates should be open (written in the language of the documentation) so the world can see if/where the company messed up.

> but soon they will be adding parts of their own ISA

Only if they can find open source contributor to optimize for that. If they do, it won't be a bad deal per say.

While it's difficult to do in your own home, you don't have to be Amazon or Apple sized to make your own ARM-based CPUs. A few dozen employees can do it.

ARM in general is available. But good ARM is only in proprietary walled gardens.

Compare RaspberryPi or Snapdragon with Apple M1.

You can buy Ampere Arm CPUs that are based on the same core as AWS Graviton2. And in general mobile CPUs are a generation ahead of server architecturally.

Only in theory. Try to buy, as a consumer, a bare Ampere CPU right now. It's impossible.

Mobile SoCs are mute, they don't have any meaningful ways to communicate with the outside world.

Apple M1 isn't in a proprietary walled garden, it's a general purpose computer like any good old x86 laptop. It's not designed with industry standards in mind and doesn't have any official documentation on internals, but it's not locked down in any way, and reverse engineering is solving the documentation problem already.

(Also Qualcomm Snapdragon is a far more cursed platform internally.)

This:

> Apple M1 isn't in a proprietary walled garden, it's a general purpose computer like any good old x86 laptop.

is functionally contradicted by this:

> It's not designed with industry standards in mind and doesn't have any official documentation on internals

And this:

> but it's not locked down in any way, and reverse engineering is solving the documentation problem already.

only improves things partially.

> (Also Qualcomm Snapdragon is a far more cursed platform internally.)

The TL;DR would be more that ARM in practice and SoCs for sure, suck. They're functionally their own little islands, compared to the PC.

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