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.
This is truly the century of open source! I’m all in into this
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.
Exciting times for risc v. Maybe we will have a workstation class CPU that isn’t reliant on closed architectures some day.
