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Martial-law
August 28th, 2008, 05:54 PM
I have an idea in my mind which I think only Einstien in this era would have thought. How about Ubuntu making an open source PC processors and sell them at competitive prices? Since open source is Ubuntu's philosophy, why not bring it into hardware. This could be a great service to people since Intel has an almost monopolisitic hold over processors and AMD is not able to compete them. Or if Ubuntu could give us the guidelines making processors ourselves and we could make them. Have any thoughts?:popcorn:

uid313
August 28th, 2008, 05:59 PM
Sun Microsystems already sell open CPU's like the Sun OpenSPARC.
* http://www.opensparc.net/
Though, its SPARC architecture, not x86.

Ubuntu cant do that, because its just a community, and Canonical is a small company. Intel and AMD are very large companies.

Making an processor requires lots of money, factories (unless you use TSMC, etc) and lots of researcher and scientists.

So the idea is not so realistic. Open hardware is a good idea though.

* http://www.opencores.org/
* http://www.openhardwarefoundation.org/
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_hardware

BlueSkyNIS
August 28th, 2008, 06:06 PM
The idea is nice, but in reality is rather impossible.

swoll1980
August 28th, 2008, 06:23 PM
They(somebody, not Ubuntu) made an open video card. It's got the specs of a $80 card, but they sell it for $1000, and you have to make your own drivers for it. Sounds like a good deal. RMS might finally get to experience decent graphics acceleration.

ssam
August 28th, 2008, 06:40 PM
They(somebody, not Ubuntu) made an open video card. It's got the specs of a $80 card, but they sell it for $1000, and you have to make your own drivers for it. Sounds like a good deal. RMS might finally get to experience decent graphics acceleration.

thats not quite fair.

they have made a dev board using reprogrammable chips called FPGA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array)s. These chips are expensive, but they let you test designs for chips. Once you have the design you then make an ASIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asic). These are much cheaper, smaller and faster.

The dev board is actually quite competitively priced for a FPAG board. It is not meant to be a graphics card.