Re:Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
by sweeneyrod on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @03:52PM
(#19974183)
I think hardware stuff is an expected exception because there are basically no open-source architectures.
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There are at least RISC-V, OpenRISC, MIPS and maybe SPARC:
https://riscv.org/ https://openrisc.io/ https://www.mips.com/mipsopen/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#Open_source_implementati...
Re:Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
by earthboundkid on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @09:09AM
(#19980745)
RISC-V was explicitly created to solve the problem of their being basically no open source architectures, and it's still fairly new, so it really is the exception that proves the rule.
Re:Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
by sweeneyrod on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @05:05PM
(#19985490)
Yep, but AFAIK they don't see much use in industry. There are people trying to change that, but they haven't succeeded yet.
MIPS gets used a lot in routers, it only went open relatively recently though.
Re:Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
by gricardo99 on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @04:26PM
(#19974554)
I agree in terms of the equivalent of standard libraries. Ex: if you want a DMA engine, a PCIE interface, Ethernet, etc... you either have to build that from scratch, or buy IP from a vendor, there's not a lot of open source. There is opencores.org, but when a company is investing a lot in their own hardware design, then tend to want higher quality, or more recent/updated designs.
But the IC/hardware toolchain is a separate issue from the design itself. It's largely proprietary, probably due to the niche market and large R&D costs involved in some of the tools.