OpenPOWER
The LibreSOC Project
a hybrid 3D CPU / VPU / GPU based on OpenPOWER
The LibreSOC Project is a hybrid 3D CPU, GPU and VPU, designed for use in mass-volume products such as smartphones netbooks tablets and Industrial SBC IoT. As such, user trust and reduced product development costs are both equally important. Both these goal are achieved by providing full source right to the bedrock (Hardware HDL, bootloader, drivers, everything) and deploying strict transparent "Libre" development criteria. The project has EUR 350,000 funding from NLnet under their PET Programme and is actively seeking developers.
Analysis of SoCs (system-on-a-chip) used for embedded, mobile and IoT shows a decade-long disturbing persistent trend that is almost 100% without exception across hundreds of integrated processors: not a single recent SoC with modern performance in the past 10 years can be used 100% effectively without at least one closed source driver. The choices for developers and end-users alike is very stark: go without the GPU, or without the VPU, or without some key critical functionality that would penalise performance or business effectiveness entirely, or compromise on integrity and end-user trust, and reduce product reliability by delivering closed source binary-only drivers.
Even the highly-regarded Freescale/NXP iMX.6 which uses Etnaviv for the GPU, and has a 19-year Long-Term Supply committment, is still burdened by closed source 3rd party binary-only drivers for the VPU. Huge multi-man-year efforts consuming precious FOSS engineer resources that could be productively deployed elsewhere are wasted on reverse-engineering these closed SoCs.
The kicker: unlike a Desktop system where swapping out the Graphics Card is a 15 minute job, you cannot replace the VPU or GPU or crypto-block on an integrated System-on-a-Chip, and you certainly cannot disable the boot-level DRM that prevents booting anything other than pre-approved signed versions of u-boot (Otherwise fantastic Windows 10 ARM laptop products using the Tegra processor quickly became landfill due to the BIOS-level DRM locking that chained right through to applications. applications that could only be downloaded once a Microsoft online account had been registered)
This situation is one that is not deliberate: it's a product of how SoCs are put together. It is simply easier for Fabless Semi Companies to license off-the-shelf solutions (GPU hard macro, VPU hard macro) with their associated closed source secretive drivers than it is to tackle what is effectively, to their perspective, a hindrance to sales and profits: issues faced by end-users who know nothing about source code or the close relationship that source code has to "Right to Repair" and security vulnerabilities.
Unbelievably, then, after more than 10 years of waiting for even just one SoC manufacturer to come out with an SoC that has full source code for its GPU, VPU, bootloader and all other integrated HDL, the solution is to design and bring to market an SoC that does exactly that, developing integrated 3D GPU and VPU capability into the same and providing a 100% committment to provide full source, right to the bedrock: HDL, bootloader, drivers, OS: everything.
This huge project requires concerted community effort and coordination with many stakeholders. Significant care is taken to appraise the OpenPOWER Foundation of the ongoing efforts and enhancements being developed on top of OpenPOWER, with a view to proposing the 3D and Video instruction enhancements to the OpenPOWER Foundation for review.
Additional information
| Type | devroom |
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More sessions
| 2/6/21 |
This will be an introduction to the OpenPOWER DevRoom, it will briefly explain the OpenPOWER Foundation, the changes we're making and how we want to interact more with the open source communities, for both hardware and software. And introduce the DevRoom for the day.
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| 2/6/21 |
Microwatt is an open-source POWER CPU implementation which can run on cheap FPGAs, bringing new level of accessibility to POWER. In the last year, we have added to Microwatt features such as a memory management unit, privilege modes, interrupts, a floating-point unit, an interrupt controller and a level-2 cache, so that now it can boot Linux. This presentation will outline these new additions to Microwatt and talk about some interesting applications for Microwatt.
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| 2/6/21 |
The presentation describes efforts of porting OpenPOWER architecture firmware to open source firmware framework - coreboot. Although OpenPOWER firmware has been open-sourced some time ago, it may still benefit by implementing the support in coreboot. The differences and benefits of the OpenPOWER firmware and coreboot will be mentioned as well as current progress of work and challenges faced during development.
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| 2/6/21 |
The game has changed, FOSS OS and software is everywhere running on every CPU architectures and devices. Even mass consumer computer manufactures are producing with "new" CPU architectures. In 2020 thanks to the Open Power ISA have opened Power Architecture new Chips. It's the right time to have (back) Power Architecture for Open Source Hardware lovers, in educations, makers, hobbyists, consumers and gaming electronics. We will see concretes present projects and future options.
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| 2/6/21 |
Void's POWER architecture port has been progressing steadily since the last OpenPOWER Summit EU talk in 2019. Recently we introduced a completely new 32-bit little endian port, which will be a big part of this talk's focus, and is a first among Linux distributions. I will not stay there though - we have more to cover, including stuff like Chromium and Electron applications in repos, faster POWER crypto in LibreSSL, reworked crosstoolchains, stable support for newest AMD GPUs, and our big endian ...
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| 2/6/21 |
The LibreSOC hybrid 3D CPU-VPU-GPU is intended to provide a significant reduction in both hardware complexity, software (driver) complexity and systems integration primarily initially for embedded and mobile environments. Larrabee or more specifically Nyuzi showed that a software-only "Traditional Vector Processor" architecture makes for a fantastic High Performance Compute Engine that, unfortunately, also turns out to have only 25% the performance/watt of current competitive embedded mobile ...
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| 2/6/21 |
James Kulina, Executive Director of OpenPOWER Foundation will be giving introduction to the Foundation and outlook for 2021 and beyond.
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