This is one of the differences between "Free" and "Open."
The x86 ISA is "open," and we can read tons about how those are implemented in hardware, although Intel is never going to give us source code for any of their processors. So they are open in the same way that trees in a forrest are available to climb, but they are non-free in the same sense that the genetic code of those trees is hard to extract and make sense of. It isn't impossible to reverse-engineer an Intel processor; indeed, it's much easier to do than to reverse engineer a tree's DNA, and trees don't even have patents on them (yet). The thing about CPUs that makes their statement not particularly impressive is that in almost all cases, the ISA of a CPU _must_ be published, otherwise you can't get developers to write code for it. But an ISA is just a language, not an implementation. GPUs are worse because they've always been peripherals, hidden behind a driver, which is responsible for generating rendering commands from OpenGL and JIT-compiling virtual instruction sets like PTX. On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 12:00 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/10/07/1936215/parallella-an-open-multi-core-cpu-architecture > > "Adapteva has just released the architecture and software reference manuals > for their many-core Epiphany processors. " > is it me or... has the term of "open" been bent so far that just releasing > the reference manuals > makes an architecture "open" ? At least, with Free Software, it's under GPL > or it is not... > > "Adapteva is planning to make the products open source." > OK, thanks, we'll all be waiting..... or not. > > </rant> > > _______________________________________________ > Open-graphics mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics > List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com) -- Timothy Normand Miller, PhD http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
