Raiden's Realm: The Future of Hardware is Open Source

The Future of Hardware is Open Source (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Oct 08, 2007 at 01:14pm
Section: Editorials
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What if we lived in a world where all hardware was open source, including CPU’s, memory, motherboards, and all peripherals? Would it be a better world, or would it be a rolling nightmare, plagued with problems, and rampant with show stopping bugs that would bring the world to a grinding halt? I honestly think the fore more than the latter. Sure, there’s always the possibility that going open source with hardware would be a bad thing, and could lead to a lot more issues. But at the same time, I think it has its potentials. And OEM's need fear not, as there'll still be a need for proprietary systems designed to meet specialized needs that wouldn’t be fulfilled by the open hardware community. But that’s true in any sector of open development.

So if all (or most) hardware went open source, what would the current hardware OEM’s do? Well, their roll would change from developer and manufacturer to specialist manufacturers. By this I’m referring to how they’d make their hardware. Since all the development, with the help of the companies, would be open source and free of patents and other legal restrictions (for the most part, GPL aside), including everything from bios to circuit traces, they would have only the most basic R&D costs.

However, while I think the future of hardware will indeed become open source, I don’t think that openness in the hardware world will become quite as prevalent as it has been in the software world. The big reason is, you make a mistake in a program, the most it costs you is a little time to fix the bug, and another little slot of time to actually recompile the code. But when you make a mistake in the hardware world, it literally costs money. Sometimes a lot of money depending on what you’re working on. Mistakes in hardware can’t be fixed as easily as mistakes in software.

There's also other problems to deal with in hardware development besides the cost of mistakes. Due to the difficulty in development of things such as CPU's and GPU's, and the requirements for special clean rooms and other things that tend to be outside the availability of the average person, some or all of the design of those types of hardware may stay in house for the foreseeable future.

Now there might be a way around all of this, and it all comes back once again to the FOSS software development community. The reason I say this is that in the big development labs at Microsoft, Apple and others, as well as several major hardware makers, there are machines that have the capabilities to mimic hardware behavior right down to the individual pathways in a CPU. With these they’re able to test a new CPU design real time, or near real time, to identify bugs, sort out logic errors and much more. They’re not perfect, but they do an incredible job and speed up hardware development by several years or more while acting to significantly reduce costs.

Now if there was some way to get something like this into the hands of the average joe, and in a form that’s either free or very low cost (free is preferable for greatest penetration and largest possible user base), and which can run on modern hardware, the things that open source hardware developers could do would blow the minds of everyone. I feel that there’s at the very least, several thousand untapped people and developers out there with the skills necessary to create a processor so fast that it’d leave even the best current offerings of Intel and AMD totally and completely in the dust. But would it destroy the big hardware OEM’s by doing this? Not at all. As long as they’re willing to adapt and grow with this new change. In fact, if they did it right, they would benefit hugely from this change!

Open Hardware is the future of technology, and all we need to kick off this next great revolution in technology is to have the right tools in the right place at the right time. After that, the sky’s the limit!

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