--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 4:30 AM David Niklas doark@mail.com wrote:
relatively speaking it's tiny.
That's the equivalent of a good house over here *totally paid for*!
and about 10-20 homes in say scotland... yes.
the difficulty level and risks associated with silicon are so high that the profits to be made are as equally enormous.
What is the cost here?
it was a throwaway comment, david, written in about 30 seconds, with about 5 seconds thought. the focus was more "a much higher bang per buck can be achieved with that kind of money" than "here is a detailed statement of work".
it would take me a *lot* more time to specifically answer that very general question without specific information.
Silicon as an element is inexpensive and even 32nm foundries should have their HW paid for by now. It's been what? 8 years since 32nm and the half node, 28nm started? And the big buyers (AMD, Intel, Nvidia) were on it for 3+ years.
28nm mask charges - the lithographic stencils onto glass - for 28nm are i think USD $2m. it's an exponential curve. 45nm is $1m. it drops to around $250,000 for 180nm.
I had imagined that with at least 4 people (by my memory and including me), offering you funding (in the fullness of time), you might have taken a cursory look into the matter.
indeed. "paying some engineers time to get the libre-licensed HDL developed", i have a vaaaague feeling that that was the focus of our discussions some months back.
If requiring, for example, a modern DDR4 memory controller, over 50% of that budget would be taken up. Hence why I am interested in HyperRAM (upcoming JEDEC xSPI).
URL?
google it, as that's exactly and precisely what i would do anyway. only cursory information is available as JEDEC runs on an ITU-style (closed, proprietary) basis.
HyperRAM on the other hand is extremely common. it's basically Quad SPI extended to 8 bit and DDR.
If not using a back-end team such as the people that IIT Madras have access to, that USD $2m would be entirely eaten by proprietary layout tool licensing from Mentor Graphics and the engineers who would need to be hired to do the work. hence why I am interested in Magic, alliance2 / coriolis, and libresilicon, all of which are developing open ASIC layout tools.
There is a *lot* i simply have not had time to talk about, here, david.
Open source HW is going to require lots of talking, luke, esp. as each part of the work gets closer to fruition.
yup.
I don't deny your wisdom in discerning your own path, but please consider at least attempting to take on a liaison/spokesmen if you cannot keep up.
if there's funds available to pay them... of course.
who goes, "that's not good, let's fix that", has absolutely *no idea* how to go about "fixing that", and persistently chips away (often randomly) regardless of complete lack of knowledge and expertise, until success.
That is *amazing*! You really sound like you know what you're doing.
i really don't: i just have a fast enough corrective loop that it may *look* that way. there are massive holes however.
Did I mention that mixed source was returning under the guise of FLOSS through chromium/android et. al.?
don't start. i'm keenly aware of the damage that google has done by using the apache2 license.
We need a leader for the OSH, someone who will stand up to the vendor lock in/greedy bullies of out time. I thought RMS, then luke would be it, but not so. You're a great person, luke, but you don't seem the type.
i'm tackling it differently by going further and further up the hardware chain. *that* is physical items that are required to be bought. that's where software cannot be "controlled", if you will. anyone can download libre-licensed source and completely ignore their ethical and moral obligation to fund the developers who created it. that *cannot* be done with hardware.
Chromium's binary blob problems are even further proof. This became painfully clear when RISC-V came out. I expected *at least* the cache to be OSH... :CRY:
I decided that if I could, it was up to me to pull in the funds for OSH, and "I think I can"(TM).
awesome. well, as usual i have a parallel set of tracks being investigated, as part of a wider strategy of deals and collaborations with various people, just bear in mind that your help would be part of a much larger deal, ok?
Ok, but I must confess I have been thinking and planning this for a long time and have quite a few good ideas about the implementation.
cool.
ok, so let's say we make a chip. it's successfully made, it's all done, and it works, right?
and then we go, "ok, who wanna buy?"
and... total absolute silence.
egg.
on.
face.
Eventually we will need normal people to be our user base. I know a bit about marketing, but estimating demand or creating a sense of needing non-propriety HW? *I have totally no idea*.
i have a potential client who will order 100,000 units in the first year, if certain power and functionaliy requirements are met. it's a self-contained market for their product so the fact that it's RISC-V is completely irrelevant to them.
then there is the india smartphone / netbook / chromebook market.
That's good. I thought you might have us eternally relying on a college or some other deal where a slip of some money from [insert enemy company] would lead to the projects all going down the drain.
nope. flexibility and multi-pronged strategy.