Hardware is essentially a vehicle for Software.
With many projects requiring very specific hardware requirements, such as printing without start-up time, artificial intelligence and more controversial projects like Bitcoin Mining, the route to market could be significantly improved with a more agile and iterative approach.
One of the goals behind Project Olympus is to close the gap of the average 1.5 years of development cycle for hardware and get closer to the typical increments being achieved for software development.
the incompleteness theorem
Microsoft's rationale for sharing an incomplete design is that "open source hardware development is currently not as agile and iterative as open source software. ... By sharing designs that are actively in development, Project Olympus will allow the community to contribute to the ecosystem by downloading, modifying, and forking the hardware design just like open source software."
Background
- Open Hardware
- Open Software
- Open Future?
Project Olympus is Microsoft’s blueprint for future hardware development and collaboration and forms a part of its hyperscale cloud hardware design and a new model for open source hardware development
Microsoft's latest contribution to Facebook's Open Compute Project introduces a new server design, it also changes the way the designs are conceived and submitted, as well as their collaboration process. Microsoft plans to share designs with the OCP as early as possible in the design process.
Physical example
Conclusion
With a large array of names, such as Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, actively collaborating and designing the latest hardware around this open source hardware framework it will be interesting to see the branches which form as dedicated projects have a vehicle to thrive and continuously develop at speed.
