We need accessible open hardware. Not shoehorning proprietary hardware to make it work with generic standards they never actually followed.
Open source is one thing, but open hardware - that’s what we really need. And not just a framework laptop or a system76 machine. I mean a standard 64-bit open source motherboard, peripherals, etc that aren’t locked down with binary blobs.
> I mean a standard 64-bit open source motherboard, peripherals, etc that aren’t locked down with binary blobs.
The problem here is scale. Having fully-open hardware is neat, but then you end up with something like that Blackbird PowerPC thing which costs thousands of dollars to have the performance of a PC that costs hundreds of dollars. Which means that only purists buy it, which prevents economies of scale and prices out anyone who isn't rich.
Whereas what you actually need is for people to be able to run open code on obtainium hardware. This is why Linux won and proprietary Unix lost in servers.
That might be achievable at the low end with purpose-built open hardware, because then the hardware is simple and cheap and can reach scale because it's a good buy even for people who don't care if it's open or not.
But for the mid-range and high end, what we probably need is a project to pick whichever chip is the most popular and spend the resources to reverse engineer it so we can run open code on the hardware which is already in everybody's hands. Which makes it easier to do it again, because the second time it's not reverse engineering every component of the device, it's noticing that v4 is just v3 with a minor update or the third most popular device shares 80% of its hardware with the most popular device so adding it is only 20% as much work as the first one. Which is how Linux did it on servers and desktops.
Not even hypothetical. See ATmega328P. It has no business being an actively supplied chip if we were to only care about technological supremacy of architectures and/or chip construction. Or countless "e8051" chips based on Intel 8051 microcontroller being https://xkcd.com/2347/ of USB.
Could Amazon or Facebook do this if they just wanted to, e.g. to help break the hold of their competitors on markets they care about? Absolutely.
Could some hobbyist do it? Not on their own, but if you do part of it and someone else does part of it, the whole thing gets done. See e.g. Asahi Linux.
"The principle of evidence-based trust was at work in our decision to implement Precursor’s brain as an SoC on an FPGA, which means you can compile your CPU from design source and verify for yourself that Precursor contains no hidden instructions or other backdoors. Accomplishing the equivalent level of inspection on a piece of hardwired silicon would be…a rather expensive proposition. Precursor’s mainboard was designed for easy inspection as well, and even its LCD and keyboard were chosen specifically because they facilitate verification of proper construction with minimal equipment."
Lots of SoCs are "open" in the sense that complete documentation including programming manuals are available. With couple man-centuries of developer time each, you could port Linux over those SoCs. but that doesn't count as being "open". On the other hand, there are a lot of straight up proprietary hardware that are considered "open", like Raspberry Pi.
Which means, "open" has nothing to do with openness. What you want is standardization and commoditization.
There are practically no x86 hardware that require model-specific custom images to boot. There are practically no non-x86 hardware that don't require model-specific custom images to boot. ARM made perceptible amount of efforts in that segment with Arm SystemReady Compliance Program, which absolutely nobody in any serious businesses cares about, and it only concern ARM machines even if it worked.
IMO, one of problems in efforts going in from software side is over-bloated nature of desktop software stacks and bad experiences widely had with UEFI. They aren't going to upgrade RAM to adopt overbloated software that are bigger than the application itself just because that is the new standard.
We'll likely never have "affordable" photolithography, but electron beam lithography will become obtainable in my lifetime (and already is, DIY, to some degree.)
Making at home transistors, or even small-scale integrated circuits is not exceedingly difficult.
However, making at home a useful microcontroller or FPGA would require not only an electron-beam lithography machine, but also a ion-implantation machine, a diffusion furnace, a plasma-etch machine, a sputtering machine and a lot of other chemical equipment and measurement instruments.
All the equipment would have to be enclosed in a sealed room, with completely automated operation.
A miniature mask-less single-wafer processing fab could be made at a cost several orders of magnitude less than a real semiconductor fab, but the cost would still be of many millions of $.
With such a miniature fab, one might need a few weeks to produce a batch of IC's worth maybe $1000, so the cost of the equipment will never be recovered, which is why nobody does such a thing for commercial purposes.
In order to have distributed semiconductor fabs serving small communities around them, instead of having only a couple of fabs for the entire planet, one would need a revolution in the fabrication of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment itself, like SpaceX has done for rockets.
Only if the semiconductor manufacturing equipment would be the result of a completely automated mass production, which would reduce its cost by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, affordable small-scale but state-of-the-art fabs would be possible.
But such an evolution is contrary to everything that the big companies have done during the last 30 years, during which all smaller competitors have been eliminated, the production has become concentrated in quasi-monopolies and for the non-consumer products the companies now offer every year more and more expensive models, which are increasingly affordable only for other big companies and not for individuals or small businesses.
> With such a miniature fab, one might need a few weeks to produce a batch of IC's worth maybe $1000
Maybe?
Another point of view might be that in a few weeks you could produce a batch of ICs you can actually trust, that would be several orders of magnitude more valuable than the $1000 worth of equivalents from the untrusted global supply chain.
> However, making at home a useful microcontroller or FPGA would require not only an electron-beam lithography machine, but also a ion-implantation machine, a diffusion furnace, a plasma-etch machine, a sputtering machine and a lot of other chemical equipment and measurement instruments.
That ASU NanoFab has indeed almost everything that is needed.
It is weird that they do not have any ion implantation machine, because there are devices that are impossible to make without it. Even for simple MOS transistors, I am not aware of any other method for controlling the threshold voltage with enough precision. Perhaps whenever they need ion implantation they send the wafers to an external fab, with which they have a contract, to be done there.
Still, I find it hard to believe that all the equipment that they have costs less than 10 million $, unless it is bought second hand. There is indeed a market for slightly obsolete semiconductor manufacturing equipment, which has been replaced in some first tier fabs and now it is available at significant discounts for those who are content with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law: “Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years”
Wafer machines from the 1970s could be fairly cheap today, if there were sufficient demand for chips from the 1970s (~1MHz, no power states, 16 bit if you’re lucky, etc), but that trend would have to stop and reverse significantly for affordable wafer factories for modern hardware to be a thing.
Peter Norvig, Fabrice Bellard, etc. The list of ultra smart people is quite long. A friend of mine thought he was pretty smart (and I would have happily agreed with him). Then he went to work for Google (early days). It didn't take long for him to realize that the only reason he seemed very smart was that he simply wasn't seeing a large enough slice of humanity.
"The principle of evidence-based trust was at work in our decision to implement Precursor’s brain as an SoC on an FPGA, which means you can compile your CPU from design source and verify for yourself that Precursor contains no hidden instructions or other backdoors. Accomplishing the equivalent level of inspection on a piece of hardwired silicon would be…a rather expensive proposition. Precursor’s mainboard was designed for easy inspection as well, and even its LCD and keyboard were chosen specifically because they facilitate verification of proper construction with minimal equipment."
In addition to what the other comments have already highlighted, there's also the fact that you'd be back to using extremely opaque, even less "open source" hardware than regular CPUs/MCUs. Almost every FPGA that could even conceivably be used to run general purpose software is locked behind super proprietary stacks
I would love to works with hardware, if you can foot my bill then I be happy to do that
since open source software is one thing but open source hardware need considerable investment that you cant ignore from the start.
also this is what happen to prusa, everyone just take the design and outsource the manufacture to somewhere in china which is fine but if everybody doing that, there is no fund to develop next iteration of product (someone has to foot the bill)
and there is not enough sadly, we live in reality after all
> Open source is one thing, but open hardware - that’s what we really need
This needs money. It is always going to have to pay the costs of being niche, lower performance, and cloneable, so someone has to persuade people to pay for that. Hardware is just fundamentally different. And that's before you get into IP licensing corner cases.
Open source is one thing, but open hardware - that’s what we really need. And not just a framework laptop or a system76 machine. I mean a standard 64-bit open source motherboard, peripherals, etc that aren’t locked down with binary blobs.