Christmas Sensation? [LWN.net]

Christmas Sensation?

Posted Oct 6, 2007 8:25 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Christmas Sensation? by dlang
Parent article: Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience (The New York Times)

As I understand it part of the deal with those laptop makers is that they get rights to the patented technology if they build the OX for cheap. This is just what I've heard.

So it would not be cool for the OLPC to then turn around and undermine that agreement by competing against their own benefactors in the consumer electronics arena.

I expect that in the next couple years we are going to start seeing bits and peices of OLPC technology popping up in the consumer electronics arena under numerous different products.

Sooo... personally I am looking forward to getting one of those EEEs. Not OLPC offshoot per say, but it's decendant from Intel's response to the OLPC program.

So x86 is cool (either Intel's ULV or the low-end AMD Geode computer-on-a-chip stuff), but I think that the ARM proccessor has lots of potential to and it's actually much more open... not to mention that Debian has very good support for it (considuring it's a minority arch for PC-level machines)

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8620895791.html

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Freedom-compatible hardware?

Posted Oct 7, 2007 18:35 UTC (Sun) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

It's interesting that you think of ARM as more "open" than x86. I kind of feel that way too, because just about every chip manufacturer on earth is an ARM licensee, which means a large ecosystem of compatible competition.

On the other hand, the ARM architecture is heavily patented. I suppose other architectures are, too, but the ARM company's whole business model is to develop new architecture features, patent them, and license them to every chip manufacturer on earth. So on the downside, you can't just start a new company and jump into the ARM game without buying a licence from the company first, but on the upside, if you do that then you can safely bequeath the designs to your children because the patents will expire twenty-one years after they were applied for. (By the way, twenty-one years ago the very first ARM processors were shipping, so already any IP present in those ones is Free.)

For x86, by contrast, there are at least three competitive companies -- Intel, AMD, and Via -- although perhaps they have all cross-licensed lots of each other's patents for all I know.

Certainly the winner of the "Freedom-compatible CPU architecture" category has to be SPARC! The CPU architecture is GPLed.

http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/links_for_2007_09_26

http://swik.net/sparc+License:GPL

Of course, the technical questions of performance and power usage and so-on are a separate matter. SPARC has not historically been used much in embedded designs. Note that the Linux-based Pepper Pad started out with ARM and then switched to AMD Geode for the Pepper Pad 3. I personally attribute the necessity of that switch to their unfortunate decision to use lots of Java software.

Freedom-compatible hardware?

Posted Oct 7, 2007 18:42 UTC (Sun) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Oh, I just stumbled upon this academic project for what they call an "embedded" SPARC design:

http://www.iaik.tugraz.at/research/vlsi/01_projects/01_is...

The important thing about stuff like this is that their design is GPL'ed. In the long run, the combination of the GPL and Sun's continued efforts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2

might lead to an ecosystem of compatible competition which is also full of Free designs.

Freedom-compatible hardware?

Posted Oct 7, 2007 19:36 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ya I suppose your right with the point up there.

After I said that I noticed that another website said that per-core the ARM is probably the most expensive to license.

Now I don't believe that patents with hardware are in the same league of 'evilness' as software patents. Two different things, not equivelent.

I just got that impression about the arm being open because everybody and their mom has their own paticular variation. (which is just terrific platform for a very portable OS like Linux)

If you think dealing with ARM is tough

Posted Oct 7, 2007 18:58 UTC (Sun) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link]

Intel's license is separate for 800Mhz bus and 1033MHz bus! Even if you have license for 800MHz bus and you hardware supports 1033MHz (typically the case) - you still need separate license. And a lot of other things are similarly licensed. Basic x86-architecture is decades old so the patents expired and AMD/Intel have cross-license agreements, but it's MUCH worse the ARM. Sparc is champion of openness, of course - but it's the case of "to late": early Sparc models were totally closed and when new, open Sparc was introduced all niches were already occupied by x86 and ARM...