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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

This is a dumb question but how far "back" (regressed) would we have to go to get "open secure" hardware?

ie we decide that having open sourced hardware designs and some way to verify the silicon matches tha hardware is the way to go.

This is not just the CPU but all the chips on a motherboard, GPU included?

IIRC Russia still fabs 286s for its military because they have verified the design and don't have to worry the NSA has added a few extra circuits.

I would guess we would could go a couple of generations back before the reduction in power more than was compensated for by the presumed extra peace of mind?

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RISC-V and MIPS are the only semi-modern architectures I know of that can be implemented with 100% open hardware down to the schematics of every single component on the mainboard/CPU/etc.

And the main problem with those is performance. Even the fastest RISC-V board currently available (which is also proprietary) is still twice as slow as a Raspberry Pi 3.

Is that “just” a matter of the process node used to fab them, though? What would the power profile of a RISC-V taped out for TSMC’s 5nm process look like?

They're still small slow processors.

Sure, it's possible to design a big fast RISC-V processor to rival the M1, but nobody has done it yet.

Wouldn't the energy efficiency of a (much) smaller process node enable you to greatly overclock the chip (compared to now where it's thermally limited to a low clock), though? And/or just pack many of them per die?

You can use ARM but it will only be open to the people paying for the NDA.

>RISC-V and MIPS are the only semi-modern architectures...

OpenPOWER.

GPUs are overrated. Just render things in software to a framebuffer, add more CPU cores if you need them.

> Russia still fabs 286s for its military

You'd think they could at least find some Arm 32-bit design. A 286 is just so cumbersome and slow...

That's probably for maintaining older machines. I doubt it's the bleeding edge of verified Russian CPU clones.

But see, that's why they have a turbo button.

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