I really hate it that big companies are rolling their own CPU now. Soon, you're not a serious developer if you don't have your own CPU. And everybody is stuck in some walled garden.
I mean, it's great that the threshold to produce ICs is now lower, but is this really the way forward? Shouldn't we have separate CPU companies, so that everybody can benefit from progress, not only the mega corporations?
>I really hate it that big companies are rolling their own CPU now. Soon, you're not a serious developer if you don't have your own CPU. And everybody is stuck in some walled garden.
It is still just ARM. You can buy ARM chip everywhere. There is no walled garden.
> Shouldn't we have separate CPU companies, so that everybody can benefit from progress,
You are benefiting the same CPU design from ARM, and same Fab improvement from TSMC. Amortised across the whole industry. Doesn't get any better than that.
> It is still just ARM. You can buy ARM chip everywhere.
Only large companies can build CPUs based on ARM. Also, now companies might rely on everything in vanilla ARM, but soon they will be adding parts of their own ISA, improvements to the memory hierarchy, a GPU, or perhaps even their own management engine to keep an eye on things or to keep things locked down.
> There is no walled garden.
There is huge potential for walled gardens, just look at Apple.
>Only large companies can build CPUs based on ARM....
Only large companies can build any modern CPUs.
> improvements to the memory hierarchy, a GPU, or perhaps even their own management engine
None of these has anything to do with ISA nor ARM. As a matter of fact adding any of these does not contribute to lock in. They are ( potentially ) fragmentation in terms of optimisation requirement.
If I am inferring correctly, the only thing that wouldn't count as locked down and walled garden by your definition would be a total open source design from Hardware to Software.
> If I am inferring correctly, the only thing that wouldn't count as locked down and walled garden by your definition would be a total open source design from Hardware to Software.
No. I'm totally fine with CPUs with fully open documentation and preferably designed by a company that specializes in CPUs. Open documentation + liberal license should allow other CPU manufacturers to compete based on the same ISA.
What I don't want is involvement of the vendor after I have bought my CPU (other than updates), or any kind of lock-in or dominance of one vendor for my ISA or dark patterns. Or drivers/updates that only work on a specific OS and thus are unusable if I decide to write my own OS for the CPU. Updates should be open (written in the language of the documentation) so the world can see if/where the company messed up.
While it's difficult to do in your own home, you don't have to be Amazon or Apple sized to make your own ARM-based CPUs. A few dozen employees can do it.
You can buy Ampere Arm CPUs that are based on the same core as AWS Graviton2. And in general mobile CPUs are a generation ahead of server architecturally.
Apple M1 isn't in a proprietary walled garden, it's a general purpose computer like any good old x86 laptop. It's not designed with industry standards in mind and doesn't have any official documentation on internals, but it's not locked down in any way, and reverse engineering is solving the documentation problem already.
(Also Qualcomm Snapdragon is a far more cursed platform internally.)
I mean, it's just ARM - pretty standard architecture these days. If the big companies want to compete on chip design, I don't see it as all that different from AMD, Intel (and Via if you count them) competing on x86-compatibles.
AMD/Intel/Via/IBM/ARM are in horizontal competition on chip design, Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Apple are in vertical competition on chip design. Vertical competition typically results in far less ability for the market to optimize.
Compare for instance the Zen 3 upset vs the M1 upset. Zen 3 allowed the market to pick what they thought was the best CPU, the M1 allowed the market to pick if they wanted to buy an entire computer, OS, and software set because the CPU was good. Similarly with Graviton and Amazon, you can't just say Amazon is competing the same as Via, their interest is in selling the AWS ecosystem not in providing the best individual components. Same with Google and their custom chips and Microsoft with theirs now. Yes many are "just ARM" but due to custom extensions/chips and (in some cases) lack of standard ARM features that doesn't mean they are the same ARM.
Of course that's not to argue it's wrong because it's vertical integration, many will think that's the better way to make complicated products, but that's not the point - the way big companies are competing on chip design is very different than if one acted like an AMD/Intel/Via competitor to actually compete in the chip space instead of a larger space.
> Yes many are "just ARM" but due to custom extensions/chips and (in some cases) lack of standard ARM features that doesn't mean they are the same ARM.
This is a stretch at best.
Linux running on M1, Graviton2 (and, soon, Graviton3), Raspberry Pi 3/4 runs same, aarch64 compiled, user space binaries. NetBSD running on M1 and on Raspeberry Pi 3/4 runs same, aarch64 compiled, user space binaries. ARM, the company, enforces the µ-architecture compatibility through the licensing. Just like Intel and AMD do.
The difference is perceptable at the hardware/kernel level; however the same is also true for nearly every new generation of Intel and AMD CPU's – at least some modifications are required in the kernel.
You are conflating software compatibility with hardware availability.
Most ARM vendors sell the equvialent of an electric bicycle when what you need is a van and there are only two viable manufacturers of vans but the first one doesn't sell to companies and the second one requires you rent the van.
I do point out that vendor-specific architectures were the norm for long time in the history and the sky didn't fall down. The x86 dominance was relatively short anomaly more than anything.
I mean, it's great that the threshold to produce ICs is now lower, but is this really the way forward? Shouldn't we have separate CPU companies, so that everybody can benefit from progress, not only the mega corporations?