A good example of why totally open chips are problematic in the commercial world.

Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability: Which is More Important to You?
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5127

As always, the devil is in the details.

" You can’t have it both ways: the whole point of transparency is to enable peer review, so you can find and fix bugs more quickly. But if every time a bug is found, a manufacturer had to hand $50 to every user of their product as a concession for the bug, they would quickly go out of business. This partially answers the question why we don’t see open hardware much beyond simple breakout boards and embedded controllers: it’s far too risky from a liability standpoint to openly share the documentation for complex systems under these circumstances. "

" However, even one of their most ardent open-source advocates pushed back quite hard when I suggested they should share their pre-boot code. By pre-boot code, I’m not talking about the little ROM blob that gets run after reset to set up your peripherals so you can pull your bootloader from SD card or SSD. That part was a no-brainer to share. I’m talking about the code that gets run before the architecturally guaranteed “reset vector”. A number of software developers (and alarmingly, some security experts) believe that the life of a CPU begins at the reset vector. In fact, there’s often a significant body of code that gets executed on a CPU to set things up to meet the architectural guarantees of a hard reset – bringing all the registers to their reset state, tuning clock generators, gating peripherals, and so forth. Critically, chip makers heavily rely upon this pre-boot code to also patch all kinds of embarrassing silicon bugs, and to enforce binning rules."

If, OTOH, there were ways to manufacture arbitrarily complex chips on the desktop for reasonable costs and in reasonable time, and so eliminate the commercial issues, this conundrum could vanish.



On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 9:13 AM, Steven Schear <schear.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
http://parallel.princeton.edu/openpiton/open_source_processors.php