An open source CPU, somewhat competitive with good ARM and x86 cores would be a groundbreaking achievement.
Indeed, and if it gets there then I imagine it will start outpacing proprietary architectures because the whole world will be contributing to it.
I wonder what impact a truly high end CPU being open would have on the fab industry.
Right now, there’s a lot of manufacturing secret sauce; if you took an Intel design, it would require significant rework to perform well on Samsung or TSMC process.
Fab owners would have a vested competitive interest to customize the design to perform better on their tooling.
Conversely, buyers might develop a renewed interest in second-sourcing-- if you can take your chip to any fab, you have more control over your supply chain.
Exciting times for risc v. Maybe we will have a workstation class CPU that isn’t reliant on closed architectures some day.
This is truly the century of open source! I’m all in into this
