News Red Hat Joins Foundation for Developing Open-Source RISC-V ISA

[Admin]

Red Hat, now part of IBM, joined the RISC-V Foundation to develop support for the open-source instruction set architecture in its Linux distributions.

Red Hat Joins Foundation for Developing Open-Source RISC-V ISA : Read more

 

[bit_user]

The holy grail of the open source community is the ability the run open-source software on open-source hardware.

Well, for some of the open source community.

Anyway, RISC-V is an open and royalty-free ISA, meaning everyone has access to the specification and can freely use it, but that doesn't mean RISC-V chips are necessarily open source.

The benefits of open source hardware are also less than open source software, because anyone can compile software themselves, but it's costly, time-consuming, expensive, and requires a lot of expertise just to prepare and submit a hardware design for fabrication. So, it's not practical for individuals to tinker with it in the same way as open source software.

Power chips aren’t all that ubiquitous, as they tend to cost a pretty penny for similar performance to Intel chips.

Last I checked, they were pretty cost-competitive with the Intel server chips they launched against.

Anyone wanting a POWER-based desktop can buy one from Raptor Computing.