Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

That is a very interesting development. I know it's not getting anywhere close to x86 (_64) open specs or some other ARM-powered SoCs, but QualComm constantly shooting themselves in the foot by closing it off and not even selling the SoCs hasn't been very productive in the low-power computing community (and industry). I get that the first instinct of NDA-driven businesses is to ignore makers or community-based hardware designs (and sales), but with the Pi selling about 10 million, it should be getting harder to ignore what used to be 'the little guys'. With innovations basically taking place at hacker's homes, not being available basically makes you useless in the sector where your chips could be great.

For Broadcom, the Pi might not have been such a big deal, a single home use router with a Broadcom SoC might easily sell 50 million units, and there are plenty of home use routers for sale with Broadcom SoCs in them (let's say, we have 100 brands/versions, that's at least 5000 million chips sold over ~10 years), but the brand name and support from the community (which is bigger in numbers as well as diversity than any of the big tech companies) is pretty much priceless when you hit that millions number and up.

I hope QualComm and their Snapdragon isn't the last one to nudge closer to availability, there are plenty of others that would be welcome to join. While being able to buy the chips themselves isn't the biggest improvement, the fact that they are actually interested in helping with some open drivers is a major improvement!

When I worked for QuIC [0] I had a chance to ask Rob Chandhok how I could connect maker spaces [1] to Qualcomm so they could buy SoCs and all the glue from Qualcomm on tape with data sheets without an NDA. He put me in touch with someone who eventually hooked me up with a Canadian VAR who sells (or sold) some sort of dev kit q10 or something for a grand a pop. It is a market that Qualcomm just doesn't care about. I was upbraided for using non-Qualcomm silicon for a demo - I asked where the Qualcomm version of the RPi was, and that was that.

[0] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2010/04/07/why-qualcomm-in...

[1] http://metrixcreatespace.com and others

Were the Dragonboards not a thing then?

https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/dragonboard-410c

At least for me Dragonboards are not suitable since they have no ethernet port (this is probably due to the fact that the 96boards specification for "Consumer Edition (CE)" (http://www.96boards.org/ce-specification from http://www.96boards.org/specifications/) does not require ethernet, but WiFi (which I consider as a bad idea)).

5000M home use routers over 10 years doesn't sound right. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage , only about 10% of 7.2B people had a fixed broadband internet connection as of 2014. And these connections are typically shared between multiple people, so assuming 1 router per 2 people, that's only 360M routers. Making the conservative assumption that they are replaced every 2 years (in my experience it's actually less frequent), that's still only 1.8B chips. And that's for the entire market, not just Broadcom.

Well, I based my loose figure on the Linksys WRT54G which sold 50 million units in 11 years. So in a best case situation, there would globally be 100 similar models in that timespan also selling about 50 million. On top of that, you usually have a CPE provided by the ISP on which the open market models are added on top of, theoretically making the market twice as big. And then there's at least one chip at the other end of the line (i.e. a line card) and possibly more since there are multiple hops in between a carrier core network and the end-user.

In the past, a router might have lasted about 5 years, but currently, with the speeds almost getting an order of magnitude higher, almost any router that's 2 years old or more is no longer suitable.

So that's why my guess with the SoC sales for broadcom-ish chips is at 5000M :) And then there's the STB's, mobile phones, smart devices, TV's, modern DECT phones, cars etc. Even every 802.11 device (be it PCI, USB or otherwise) has a SoC, as the radio's can't work on the host CPU due to timing.

As the x86_64 world continues to get more locked down, it's going to be interesting to see whether a market niche opens up for a less-constrained platform.

Can you elaborate on how the x86_64 world has gotten more locked down?

The biggest example is Intel and their taking away of ability to do custom chipsets for their chips. That move torpedoed NVIDIA's Ion. If you want custom, then you go ARM.

onboard trusted execution engine running God knows what.

The first two responses are right on the money -- "trusted" modules, locked-down chipsets, can't write or use open firmware. This is why we get so excited when a random ThinkPad model might have a firmware bug that allows us to bypass the TMM.

There as so many blobs and secret controllers in the x86 platform it's not even funny. Since Core 2 Duo there is basically no way to run a CPU+PCH (or 'chipset') with free software. An average x86 PC has 10 'hidden' controllers doing all sorts of magic, and you can't touch it. The Intel Management Engine and Boot Guard make it extremely hard to use the chips without Intel's approval, NDA and a truckload of money.

Here are some pages with details:

https://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation https://www.coreboot.org/Intel_Management_Engine https://www.coreboot.org/Blob_Matrix

Intel also made it so that a PC has a timer that turns it off after 30 minutes if you don't run their signed firmware.

It's confusing to me that you're calling it "less-constrained." The signed-bootloader world really caught fire in SoCs like Snapdragon and indeed the 410E and 600E include SecureMSM/TrustZone. It hasn't (yet) found big popularity in x86_64 designs -- even when the processors offer it many customers don't leverage/enable it.

The "locked down" designs come from two big motivators: DRM and security. Since many snapdragon phones are sold with subsidies, the signed bootloader allows the network operator to restrict the phone's "owner" in various fashions. The security provided by a signed bootloader is real -- it's much harder for a malicious actor to create ransomware that targets mobile phones like they do PCs.

I'd expect/hope that you can decide not to opt-in on the Snapdragons' SecureMSM features, but it doesn't seem any "less-constrained" than Intel or AMD's offerings.

The locked-down hardware architecture definitely enhances security, as far as protecting the embedded firmware and IP. As a consumer, I don't want a clipper chip in my pocket. It's a sad situation for hardware these days, because if you don't comply with the unwritten rules, you'll go the way of Joseph Nacchio and Qwest.

So, to be honest, I don't know all that much about the ARM world, and I hadn't heard of TrustZone. I looked it up, and it seems that the OEM has a great deal of discretion in setting it up, to the extent that there's a reference implementation on GitHub [0]. And if I buy a bag of loose SOCs, which I can apparently do now, I'm the OEM.

[0] https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware

Right, kinda like what happens when you buy a Xeon or an Opteron. You can enable AMD SKINIT / Intel TXT & UEFI Secure Boot if you like. Intel didn't force this upon the consumers, the OEMs requested the processor features.

But one cannot disable Intel ME. So

> Intel didn't force this upon the consumers

is wrong. I know that vendors producing servers want that Intel ME (because otherwise remote servicing servers would be much harder), but they surely did not require from Intel that Intel ME cannot be disabled.

But IME is distinct from "Intel TXT & UEFI Secure Boot" ("this"'s referent).

> Intel didn't force [Intel TXT & UEFI Secure Boot] upon the consumers

is true. Both of those things can be disabled on most hardware. In fact, I disabled them on the laptop the I just bought, because I wanted to install OSes that aren't SecureBoot signed.

We might as well use an unencumbered ISA as well, like RISC-V. I'm hopeful that that project will take off. It seems to be doing quite well so far. There is still an uncomfortable amount of proprietary junk and questionable hardware modules in the ARM world as well, even if it's a lot easier to get a plain SoC and turn it into a computer.

Yep. I'm actually really excited to get my hands on a Pulpino[0], just because it's based on RISC-V. Everytime this topic comes up, I flash back to "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing"[1] and think "we can't let computing become totally locked down". Hence I'm always interested in finding ways to support more open platforms, and something like an open ISA like RISC-V seems like an important element of that.

[0]: http://www.pulp-platform.org/

[1]: http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

> Everytime this topic comes up, I flash back to "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing" [http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html]

Don't forget the sequel Fighting Back in the War on General Purpose Computers:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT6itfUUsoQ

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