TheRaven64's Journal: Would You Buy Open Source Hardware?

I have recently become interested in the concept of open source hardware. It seems that you can buy FPGAs which provide a reasonable amount of performance for a relatively low cost. This means that you can implement your own CPU etc. designs in Verilog / VHDL. Places like opencores.org allow collaborative work on these designs, and so you can even download someone else's CPU design and use this.

This is all well and good, but FPGAs don't offer the same feature density as even ASICs (although they are re-writable), so this raises the question of whether it would be commercially viable to do a run of ASICs based on an open core, with a motherboard also based on an open design. Would you buy a motherboard / CPU that could run, for example, NetBSD and was entirely open source? How much of a premium would you be willing to pay for such a thing?

I really like the design of the Alpha CPU, and I would be interested in a machine that had a similar core design, and maybe willing to pay around a 50% premium over x86 for the elegance of the system - particularly if I could also download the core design to an FPGA, modify it, and submit changes back for inclusion in the next revision.

One of the real advantages of open source software is that it can easily be compiled for multiple architectures, so once you've written a GCC back-end and a boot loader for your system you suddenly have a huge amount of usable software.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the ideal CPU would have a very simple instruction set, and not even do out-of-order execution. Code running on it should be compiled first into some kind of byte-code, and any re-scheduling should occur in the bytecode JIT - move as much complexity into software as possible, since it's much easier to upgrade (and to configure at run-time).

Open source Lisp Machine?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

This might be a way to implement an Open Lisp Machine. You'd need to optimize for recursion, and eliminate the intel distinction between data and code, but it would be fun to have a lisp machine :-)

Re:Open source Lisp Machine?

[TheRaven64]

Not a true LISP machine, but it might be possible to build a LISP implementation on top of the Java Optimised Processor [opencores.org]. The Java VM is stack-based, and modelled closely after LISP machines (they were designed by the same person, after all).

Even stranger still...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

JEmacs [bothner.com] is a re-implementation of the Emacs programmable text editor. It is written in Java, and currently uses the Swing GUI toolkit. Emacs is based on the extension language Emacs Lisp (Elisp), which is a dynamically-scoped member of the Lisp family. JEmacs supports Elisp, as well as the use of Scheme, a more modern statically-scoped Lisp dialect. Both languages get compiled to Java bytecodes, either in advance or on-the-fly, using the Kawa compilation framework.