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Comment by PhaseLockk | Hacker News Reader

I'm not exactly clear on what the post is advocating. If it's saying that there should be an open source implementation of an FPGA, then I just have to say that I think there's no way that's happening anytime soon. There are way too many hurdles.

If the argument is just that the open source community should leverage FPGAs more as a means of creating more powerful "open source" hardware, and that there should be more resources for people to learn how to write hardware, then I guess I agree with that. But I don't think FPGAs will be the panacea the author seems to think they will. FPGA implementations will always entail a performance and/or efficiency hit compared to ASIC implementations, and I think many people won't want to take that hit, limiting the number of users who are willing to adopt the open source solutions.

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Author here - I'm advocating the latter.

I agree with you to a point. However, I believe that those things that have been with us for decades: sound cards, 2D graphics adaptors, network cards, etc. can be done in FPGAs, and should be.

The speed is there, and the power used by the southbridge and peripherals is eclipsed by the processor and the screen backlight, so I don't think the power consumption is worth worrying about (I'd be interested to see evidence to the contrary, though).

Put another way: much of the foundational chips on motherboard are no long performance-sensitive, so we shouldn't be paying a compatibility price for it.

Why not just choose a small set of "golden" chips, create high quality drivers that abstract away incompatibilities if possible, and verify the heck out of that ?

The trouble with "golden" chips is a) the manufacturer can EOL it at any time (and I don't think just the OSS people are numerous enough to keep any specific set in production), and b) it freezes things in time. For things that don't change much (e.g. sound cards), no problem, but there's still improvements to be made in other areas.

The focus for FPGAs has traditionally been performance, but I think there's a model where they can be used for both long-lived compatibility and cutting-edge devices living together on the same chip.

That's… sort of happening with laptops. Pretty much any modern laptop with an Intel CPU uses a small set of Intel chips for everything. My dmesg includes:

em0: <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection>

iwm0: <Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 7260>

xhci0: <Intel Panther Point USB 3.0 controller>

ehci0: <Intel Lynx Point LP USB 2.0 controller USB>

ahci0: <Intel Lynx Point-LP AHCI SATA controller>

drmn0: <Intel Haswell (ULT GT2 mobile)>

Most laptops from the same generation use the exact same set of chips.

But a fully open-source, verified implementation - could be the basis for a structured asic, that improves performance and cost with volume, and production may start to happen at kickstarter scale.

Altough still, manufacturers and governments could create bugs, if they want.

But what will the big difference be between a minimal set of "golden" commercial chips, that have fully open-source drivers and a comprehensive test suite ? not much, it seems.

Maybe the way to attack this is seek the places where an FPGA implementation(over say a desktop/laptop? card) would be superior and offer that. One such place could noise cancelling algorithms - such high quality headphones are very expensive(and highly proprietary), need very low-latency compute, and offer an interesting challenge/competition for open-source designers.

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