Open source people "cheering" for Broadcom and Qualcomm based chips? I'm horribly confused as to when the open source types decided they liked greedy, horrible, shitty companies?
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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I don't want arm or risc v to replace x86 unless we still get to have motherboards with upgradable cpu sockets. And ram slots. And gpu compatible pcie slots. None of the current players are going to give us anything like that.
I'd be happy if they even sold hobbiests loose chips so we could figure it out ourself though. The arm and risc microprocessors on mouser are like the bottom of the barrel leftovers after the corpos have had their pick.
There's stuff for sale like that on the ARM side, but you'll pay out the nose for it, as it's all enterprise-y server-y stuff. For example, you can buy Ampere chips and boards that have ram slots and pci-e slots and all that jazz, but it costs way too much to make any sort of sense at the consumer level.
But yeah, on the consumer side we're never going to get modifiable and upgradable systems from the current crop of SOC vendors, and, worse, the x86 duopoly looks to want to head down the integrated RAM and non-upgradable path too :(
Since forever. Go to any "open source" conference and you might as well be sitting in a Mac conference.
ARM will replace x86 and RISC V will move into ARM's old slot.
RISC V is what you’re looking for
It's not even the first time 😭
... when it is actually usable one day.
The big problem of RISC-V is the fragmentation of the market, and it is not even a big market to start with.
RISC-V has already been ruined by a zillion proprietary vendor extensions.
Can the extensions not be replaced?
no it's part of the physical hardware design
What I mean is, given the open source nature of RISC V, if someone puts out a chip with a proprietary extension, isn't it likely that there will be a rip off that does the same but in an alternative manner? Like how there's tonnes of Raspberry Pi like boards available.
The RISC-V is an extensible ISA, so yes. All those vendor extensions are optional, when fabricating the processor, which can be replaced by other extensions over time.
Both Intel and AMD have had vendor extensions in the designs that they no longer use, even ones that have been "retracted" (i.e whatever in the heck Intel is doing with their AVX extensions).
But yeah, currently, there are a lot of proprietary extensions, which could still be declared as open hardware as well. So yeah.
I'm honestly surprised that RISC V wasn't licensed so that it was only open architecture.
I love seeing ARM wrestling