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Comment by Conan_Kudo | Hacker News Reader

There are 386 and 486 open source reimplementations in Verilog (see z386 and z486). As far as I know, existing commercial 386/486 chips still manufactured (yes they exist!) are descendants of Cyrix work, not Intel or AMD. Consequently, VIA may be contractually holding those back rather than Intel/AMD doing anything there.

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Thanks for that information! I have been interested in getting x86 produced in smaller nanometer (e.g. <32nm). My project: https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about

Edit: It also appears Nvidia might also have an x86 license: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/uli-m6117c/

Also, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-licens... (Caveat: The startup is acquainted with the Intel CEO, so it's rare for them to grant the x86 license to non-buddies.)

"Intel provided Rosaic access to an unknown Atom-class core, which enables the company to build its own custom processors based on x86 general-purpose cores, according to the report. The renowned chipmaker plans to ship Rosaic register-transfer level (RTL) code for the Atom processor core, which will let the startup build its custom system-on-chip (SoC) both at Intel Foundry and elsewhere."

What's interesting is that a startup with limited funds would most likely seek a 32-bit x86 license if a) they don't need more than 4GB of RAM, and b), if they don't want to pay AMD for the 64 bit license add-on. :)

I'll also point out that we've always had better starting points for open source high performance cores. SPARC and POWER both have open ISAs and open-source cores with useful performance. The UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors were open sourced under the OpenSPARC project. POWER has the OpenPOWER project governing the Power ISA, and IBM itself created Microwatt, Chiselwatt, and the A2I/A2O cores as open source that people can build their own PowerPC systems from.

OpenFirmware came out of OpenSPARC and is also used by POWER too. Parts of it are used in ARM and RISC-V today (mostly DeviceTree, though arguably quite badly).

Nobody actually wants to make good cores for cheap. Nobody wants to make compatible systems unless forced to. That's why ARM and RISC-V are fragmented messes.

True, and the only reason I'm partial to x86 and even some older ARMv cores is that there is a huge existing software ecosystem already available, reducing the need to develop new bootloaders and ports, as coding hours aren't free. CISC cores are treated as if they are a dirty word, but are more versatile for covering various applications.

PowerPC at least still has a living ecosystem, even from the bootloader level. GRUB can boot from an OpenFirmware system. There's also yaboot if you hate yourself. ;)

I would personally love to see more Power Systems based projects. Everything is out there, just someone has to want to do something with it.

Fedora Linux even fully supports POWER8+ little-endian systems, and Fedora KDE offers a live ISO you can install on something like a Talos Workstation.

There have been some PowerISA implementations, https://libre-soc.org/openpower/ although libre project had a major setback a few years ago:

https://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/2024-Sep...

Yes, but compared to RISC-V neither OpenSPARC nor OpenPOWER are really going anywhere. Not really sure why, maybe the lawyers read the fine print about the level of openness they actually provide and decide that nope, not gonna touch that one?

Technically just looking at the ISA both SPARC and POWER seem fine enough. So why is nobody interested?

(Talos is interesting but not really an answer to the question, as it seems to be focused on building affordable-ish systems around an existing CPU, not developing new CPU's.)

OpenSPARC is under the GPL, which is probably why it didn't go anywhere directly. OpenPOWER is under permissive creative commons licenses, and people are iterating on the open source cores released by them. But the arrangement with efabless didn't go anywhere, and the company shut down last year without warning. So there's nowhere to experiment with producing chips.

https://wafer.space allows chips but I think tinytapeout became what efabless was doing: https://chipfoundry.io/

Also Hitachi's SH-2 & SH-4 patents expired in 2016, so J-core picked up where they left off: https://j-core.org/

MIPS also went open source around 2018: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-hardware/mip...

x86_64 is itself well over 20 years old. You don't have to pay for it. And at this point SSE4 is on the verge of escaping patents, so a new startup might as well aim for that level. AVX is where you might run into patent fuss, but AVX isn't particularly important.

I had the same thought too months ago. In fact, I speculated the i840 GPU could also be integrated. Might the i915 GPU (GMA 900) also be ready for patent expiration?? https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-nm10-chipset-back... although, the Sandy Bridge process would be ideal in terms of efficient iGPU integration.

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