HN user
How do you want to do place and route for the high end boards that are not open/reversed anyway? Related to the gains, I don't think bitstream generation is the biggest emphasis, its just a no-brainer after you have everything reversed and can do place&route in OSS.
I have done this succesfully as well, even in another country than which I bought them in initialy. Nearly 2 years out of warranty at the time of replacement, replacement itself was not a problem.
There has been some older work on reversing AMD K8 and K10 that lets you do something vaguely similar. This work is just way more generalized, with more options available in the Intel way of things. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity17/technical...
Seems like you can't really trace the AMD CPUs like the reversing of that Intel Microcode allows, but you can still do a lot.
"As should be obvious by now, there is no situation where these foundry processes and tools are open source."
This is already false. The famous OpenPDK by Skywater (sponsored by Google) is proving this article wrong from the beginning. (https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk)
Yes, thats a rather old technology node, but you can now synthesize your free RISC-V design with a free Toolchain (openROAD) onto this open PDK.
Amazing times!
Really? The book might not be suitable to read it from cover to cover in bed, but still approachable. The videos are also really nice and easy going (I took the lecture at his uni, nice foundation).
Compared to this book you seem right, the glimps I had was easily digestable and still concise.