> And that CPU is no more "open" than the libre end of ARM chips elsewhere.
replyIt is amazing how often people seem to forget this. The only thing RISC-V means is that the person designing the cores doesn't have to pay a license fee for the architecture. It doesn't say anything about the open-ness of the core IP itself, let alone the final SoC.
Nothing is stopping you from making a RISC-V chip locked down tighter than Apple's, and nothing is stopping you from making a completely open chip based on the x86 parts whose patents have expired.
So true. I haven't checked out the CPU start9 is using (so please don't read this as an attack on them), but so much RISC-V hardware advertises itself as "open", but when you look up the SoC, it's only partially documented, only works with old forked vendor kernel, only boots with forked uboot, has GPUs and NPUs that are completely undocumented and have no open source driver (or only an open wrapper around a big firmware blob)...
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