@r @ireneista @mcc @MaddieM4 right right, the point is more "there is active work being done in the open silicon space that definitely wasn't happening in the last decade or so"

@r @ireneista @mcc @MaddieM4

while yes, proprietary tooling is very much "the standard" right now, the fact of matter is that unless people actively work towards it, nothing is going to happen

i guess i'm just one of those people that feel that even if a goal is far off, you have to start setting foundational steps even if you don't get to see the final result, so the fact that something like a field solver is even being worked on openly is better than a decade ago where there was practically zero work in that regard...still better imo

@ireneista @mcc @decay @MaddieM4 one thing i appreciate about Apple's SEP (despite yes, being from Apple and a closed, black-box so still not gonna say that anyone should just blindly trust it) is that the threat model they went for it was mutual distrust, where both the main CPU and the SEP core distrust each other, so both isolate their memory from each other

for context, both ME/PSP are modeled such that they own the platform entirely afaict, so if you get code exec in the ME or PSP, you own the whole platform, while in Apple's case, owning the SEP these days does not let you own the AP entirely, you still have to overcome most the other normal hurdles and can't just trivially DMA into host memory

that said, imo security processors including the SEP should not be unauditable black boxes at all, there's too much at stake for that to imo be a truly trustworthy system...

@mcc @decay @ireneista @MaddieM4 part of me does sorta wish that rust wasn't so dependent and reliant on cargo and such...

@ireneista @mcc @MaddieM4 agreed, i personally feel there is some hope here, just that i think more eyes need to be on these less often discussed parts of the stack

@mcc @ireneista @MaddieM4 right, but an open ISA is not the same thing as being able to create silicon with said ISA, for a truly open chip, we do need people who can fabricate said silicon, is more my point

also RISC-V is evolving, usually according to how big companies want it, it's not like RISC-V stood still and just froze, there's a lot of funky stuff being added to it (M-mode being my usual example, it reeks of "intel SMM" levels of mistakes personally)

@ireneista @mcc @MaddieM4 tbf i suspect a lot of it is that a very large amount of the tooling needed to make remotely modern CPUs and chips and such (PDKs, etc) is under so much NDA'ed lock and key (seriously, the things i've heard about this are on the border of absurd...) that you basically need %BIG_COMPANY% resources to even enter the sphere....so effectively even if the ISA is open, it's big companies who are driving the standard effectively

@MaddieM4 @mcc honestly, very fair point, was definitely something i was considering as well, and i personally would be VERY happy with a fully properly no slop open sourced GPU even if it had a limited audience and/or limited scope, GPU land has felt so prohibitively closed for so long that i'd definitely be chomping at the bits to try it out

@MaddieM4 @mcc sadly i suspect for most casual people (not nerds like us, like the average person you'd see elsewhere and to be very clear i am VERY supportive of this goal of a proper open sourced GPU) unless it's at feature parity with NVIDIA (which i hear those kinds of drivers and underlying firmware/ISAs are nightmares to develop and maintain) i doubt much outside nerd-sphere would care enough to even gain significance

that + the fact that i also hear it's apparently ruinously expensive to develop GPUs (like everything about them i hear is only getting more expensive by the day, especially on the performance side) that a serious one would likely have serious maintainability issues i fear