Comment by kriro

I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things

If there were an economically viable number of people who cared about those things (and it would need to be significantly more than 1%), we'd be running SPARC or POWER or maybe SuperH derived systems, all of which have open source, royalty free implementations.

For example, OpenSPARC is something like 20 years old, and covers SPARC v8 through t2. SPARC LEON is a decade older, and is under a GNU license, and has been to space.

And that doesn't consider going the Loongsoon route: take an existing ISA (e.g. MIPS), just use it, but carve off anything problematic (4 instructions covered by patents).

It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that in the 'processor hierarchy of needs', an open source license is of no consequence in the actual market.

Open standards don't mean a thing; you can't execute code on a standard. There are past open ISAs like OpenSPARC, MIPS, and OpenPOWER that never gained any traction.

High performance implementations, i.e. actual chips you can buy, are going to be proprietary and that's not going to change. Engineering hardware is expensive.

ISA being open matters very little if chip design isn't and RISC-V isn't going to change much here

“People who care about these things” enough that they’re buying Mini ITX RV motherboards? Definitely well under 1% of the market.

I have increasingly negative things to say about this.

There is (so far) nothing 'open' about RISC-V. and I wonder if there really ever was any desire for it, at this point.

This whole "Open ISA" crap appears to be a thin veneer to funnel quite large sums of investment into an otherwise completely proprietary and locked-down environment that could never harm the incumbents in any meaningful way - while still maintaining just enough of a pretense of open source, that the (regrettably myself included) shallow nerds and geeks could get smitten by it.

Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.

I want my SoC to have a special register that has the git SHA ID of the exact snapshot of the repository that was used to cook the masks. that, now that - is Open Source. that is Open Computing. And nothing less!

I dont care about the piece of paper with instruction encodings - the least interesting part of any computer!

Wasn't that the whole point? We're more than a quarter of a century in and we're still begging SoC vendors for datasheets. Really incredibly embarassing and disappointing.