If they had no chance of any reward for their efforts, but expected their decades of work to make some already wealthy chip vendors a bit richer, you think they would bother?
This kind of thing is the best possible use of the patent system: it’s supporting extremely novel and creative technical invention and engineering, not preventing anyone else’s work (nobody was intending to make anything remotely similar), and putting the details of the new inventions into the public sphere for anyone’s study now and free use in 20 years.
To make use of these inventions requires billions of dollars of capital investment in chip fabrication infrastructure. Anyone with serious intentions can approach the Mill people and ask to license their technology.
reminds me of gimp, or emacs
Hardware is harder than software.
> The designers claim that new principles are becoming rare in instruction-set design, as the most successful designs of the last forty years have become increasingly similar. Most of these that failed, failed because their sponsoring companies failed commercially, not because the instruction-sets were technically poor. So, a well-designed open instruction set designed using well-established principles should attract long-term support by many vendors.
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> Not asking this rhetorically
It’s hard to take your comment seriously, since you don’t seem to understand what the Mill people are trying to do (even in basic concept, i.e. rethinking the entire design of the CPU).
I recommend you watch a few of Ivan Godard’s lectures. That will give you a much better idea than reading discussion here.
It seems like they're doing that now mainly to get better feedback. I can't imagine that rationale would make as much sense once their stuff is more stable.
So it won't be useful for another 20ish years. Yay?
> It will, naturally enough, break. However, by hosting it ourselves we can capture what failed, and use that as raw feed for our test/debug team.
Wow, this is gettting more and more depressing.