Re:Arm IPO to kick off today with company valued at $54.5B
by xorcist on Thursday September 14, 2023 @12:34PM
(#37511178)
MIPS? PowerPC?
They're all open, albeit with somewhat varying definitions of the term.
Re:Arm IPO to kick off today with company valued at $54.5B
by AnthonyMouse on Thursday September 14, 2023 @12:41PM
(#37511299)
MIPS wasn't opened up until they were already dead, and then almost immediately threw in the towel and joined up with RISC-V.
PowerPC basically the same, not opened until after it was irrelevant. OpenPOWER is in the same enterprise market as SPARC and IBM is not far from Oracle on the "do not engage litigious bureaucracy" chart.
Re:Arm IPO to kick off today with company valued at $54.5B
by monocasa on Thursday September 14, 2023 @01:22PM
(#37511905)
MIPS didn't really open. They made a big deal about it, but it turned out to mean something to the effect of 'we'll open more of our build system to partners who pay for a traditional MIPS license. No third party MIPS cores. No general release of MIPS RTL.'
But previous open ISAs were in the wrong market segment. Okay, SPARC is open, but it's also Oracle and no one trusts them, and the existing SPARC ecosystem is the enterprise market which expects big, hot hundred-thread systems and has no use for a simple dual-core CPU at 800 milliwatts. But that's the thing you can produce with a low budget, so it never goes anywhere or no one even makes one.
People are starting to use RISC-V for the thing where that actually works.