The Hardware Hacker by Andrew Bunnie Huang

Author:Andrew Bunnie Huang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: No Starch Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHY THE BEST DAYS OF OPEN HARDWARE ARE YET TO COME

One of the most critical outcomes from my year of soul searching was the realization that the best days of open hardware are still ahead. As I contemplated in my interview with Phil, Chumby didn’t fail because of its open hardware model. At worst, the model had little bearing upon the consumer appeal of the product; at best, it was a good talking point. Nowhere in that interview did I gripe about plummeting sales in response to cheap clones appearing on the market due to our liberal open source policies.

Rather, one of our biggest challenges was an inability to keep up with Moore’s law. Chumby simply didn’t have the resources as a startup to keep pace. It took two to three years to push a major platform revision, at which point that revision was already obsolete. My PhD dissertation* was centered on Moore’s law and its impact on computer architecture. The most powerful computers are descendants of a processor designed in the 1970s (the Intel 8085) with derivatives still used today as the brains of toaster oven. Why? Because running existing code on backward-compatible CPUs has almost always been faster than porting old code to a new microarchitecture. Given that fact, in my thesis, I designed a microarchitecture that nobody could possibly implement at the time but that might be optimal for a computer that could be built 10 to 15 years out. A small team of researchers would have ample time to develop the infrastructure necessary for a novel computer that would be relevant the day it’s finally switched on. I spent several months in the late ’90s studying the underpinnings of Moore’s law, trying to understand where it runs thin and where it holds strong. At the time, the strongest limitation was the speed of light, so my thesis revolved around architectural tricks to reduce communication latencies.

In 2011, about a decade after my graduation and right around the end of Chumby, I had an opportunity to give a “vision” keynote at the Open Hardware Summit. I decided to review my notes from college and see if there might be another decade left in Moore’s law. There isn’t, and that has profound ramifications on the future of open source hardware. This section is an adaptation of a blog post I wrote in 2011 sharing my thoughts; thankfully, here in 2016, I’ve yet to retract any of the statements I made back then.

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