Re: [RE: [oc] What about Crusoe]

[Joe Zott <jaz@itvc.com>]

At 08:35 AM 2/14/00 Asia/Tel_Aviv, you wrote:
>For information about opensource hardware business models visit the
openipcore
>home page

Based on published reports, Transmeta has been in business for 5 years and
has 200 employees. There is not an open source hardware business model that
can support that type of company and provide a sufficient return on the
investment required to start such a company.

While not a very active open software developer I have used and benefited
from open source software for many years. I am very interested in the
growth of the open ip hardware business model because I do think it makes
sense for some developments and situations. I feel that I am making a few
minor contributions to the movement. I was in the office at 5:30 AM on
Saturday synthesizing one of the free-ip groups cores. But like the open ip
software movement the open ip hardware movement exists because there is a
commercial hardware business.

I have been to the openip website and looked at the proposed business
models. Perhaps they will work, but I think that the for the open ip
hardware movement to succeed a different model is needed. I am hoping that
small and medium sized companies, like the one I work for, can band
together to develop and maintain a set of cores. I believe that these cores
will be ones that are necessary for our developments, but will not be ones
that the company is using to distinguish themselves.

Sorry to get a bit off topic and to rant a little, but I think engineers
should be aware of the business aspects of their work.

Also in comment to
>Most of Transmeta's inovations are ugly hacks to speed up execution of X86

I agree. My comments were more in the context of doing a processor design
that requires a VM so that there is any software to run on it. This is a
very IBM mainframe-ish style of development and I was wondering if this
suggests a direction for future processor innovations.

And 
>They did no such thing - Embedded Linux will work equally well on anyone's
>"information appliance" while the Crusoe can run any OS that works on the
X86.
>The two were announced together, but they are not related.

But why does a semiconductor company doing processors announce an operating
system? As I understand it they are not using generic embedded Linux, but
one with proprietary optimizations for the Crusoe processor. Very strange.

Joe