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Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

Power CPUs are also the only currently on the market that work with open source firmware from the ground up – everything else needs proprietary microcode and/or firmware blobs.

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If you're curious where that lives, check out the OpenPower Github project.[1]

(full disclosure - I worked on tiny pieces of the code and stuff adjacent to it in the design)

[1] https://github.com/open-power

I don't think that is 100% true, you can bootstrap ARMs with ARM trusted firmware+tianocore. That doesn't mean that a large number of arm devices can be bootstrapped that way due to decisions made by the ARM licensee.

https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware http://www.tianocore.org/edk2/ (for more platform support add git.linaro.org/uefi/OpenPlatformPkg.git)

Yeah, or possibly j-core j2 [0] if you fab the chips yourself and don't need much power.

[0] http://j-core.org/

No offence, but the POWER is the only free CPU on the market that isn't a hippie piece of crap.

"No offense intended. Now please, allow that to completely excuse me as I offer a direct insult."

No, really. I get it, building your own CPU is fun. But they're all useless for the debate at hand, because nobody wants obsolete, slow, power hungry CPUs just because they're free.

at least one company want's this cpu [1], (but since one of the reimplementors of the superH architecture, or whatever you want to call them, works there - as CEO in fact - , take it with a huge grain of salt).

since you seem to know about the power consumption, can you please share some numbers about the power consumption of the jcore cpu (on a comparable process to other cpu's build for IoT devices, usb controllers etc)?

jcore is not intended to be a replacement for the main cpu, so this would be really interesting to me, and would save me from asking on the mailing list. ;P

[1] http://se-instruments.com/press_releases/sei-adopts-open-sou...

The insult is to the chip, not to redtuesday.

I mean this as a genuine question: isn't OpenSPARC a free-as-in-speech CPU that I would presume - given its lineage - isn't a hippie piece of crap?

On the paper, but is any actually available on the market?

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