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Sun Moves Into Commodity Silicon
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Aug 07, 2007 05:07 PM
from the whole-lotta-threads dept.
from the whole-lotta-threads dept.
Samrobb writes "According to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun has decided to release its UltraSPARC T2 processor under the GPL. Schwartz writes, 'We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week — delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing power on a single chip — running standard Java applications and open source OS's. Simultaneously, we've said we're entering the commodity marketplace, and opening the chip up to our competition... To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2... the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL.'" Sun is still working on getting these released; early materials are up on OpenSPARC.net.
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Sweet (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Informative)
Because MAJC [wikipedia.org], picoJava [wikipedia.org], aJile [ajile.com], and Jazelle [wikipedia.org] don't count, right?
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Re:Sweet (Score:4, Insightful)
The important thing to note is that the "jokes" often lack humor, so recognizing them becomes a terrifying ordeal of memorizing the groupthink prejudices.
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Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What I would point out is that x86 processors are incredibly crude, crufty and rather antiquated, retaining, even in the 64 bit implementations, features that were used in the lowly 8088/8086. In fact there was a time a selling point of the processors was that 8080/8085 assembly code assembled and ran correctly on 16-bit hardware. I would not be surprised if lots of CP/M software did have their first PC-DOS versions by little more than a straight rec
Re:Sweet (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
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Nothing to see here, please move along. (Score:4, Insightful)
But seriously, what's the real point? Are the means to actually make one of these processors beyond 99% of companies and pretty much 99.99% of the people on the planet? What about the patenting of the process or equipment to actually make the processor?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
now most people in developed countries use dozens (including embedded systems) every day, and a desktop of awesome (by 1960s standards) power can be had for a few days salary
think big, cast aside pre-conceptions
FPGAs (Score:4, Insightful)
Many FPGA houses provide free ARM cores etc for inclusion on their FPGAs. You can build an ARM-based (or other core based) device using free download tools and run it on an FPGA that costs a few bucks. To do this the licensee need to pay a heft licencing fee to ARm or whomever. Now they can also distribute GPL cores.
But is this really useful? To use a GPL core would mean that all the rest of the chip design would have to be released too. Very few hardware builders will be prepared to release their silicon source code because that is often the only way they have of preventing mass knock-offs etc.
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Re:FPGAs (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, someone just did:
More details on Simply RISC's [srisc.com] web site.
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Re:FPGAs (Score:4, Funny)
In the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes, 20 years from now?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm thinking China. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention Windows not running on such, but Linux will.
And China would have a home source of chips for their IT industry and would not have to import Intel or AMD.
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Various options. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Various options. (Score:5, Interesting)
As part of my research I have to hand tweak and tune the inner most loops of our algorithms. Unfortunately, the performance of moderns processors behaves so counter-intuitively when pushing the floating-point units to the max, that it is basically impossible to guess whether a certain change will speed up or slow down the computation. Being able to know *exactly* what in in the CPU would greatly help with this.
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Re:Various options. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know of anyone who has gone to the gate level to tune software - I've never found it necessary to go beyond a high-level definition of the processor, the sizes/speeds of the caches, the lanes between the segments, the length of each pipeline segment and other such information that can be basically listed. However, such information will not reveal unintended features (distinguished from bugs by being useful) and won't expose every possible shortcut.
HPC is fun, though I agree that modern processors are counter-intuitive. They can do some seriously weird things at times, which is why CPUburn is such an interesting program. If only the developers still maintained it. :( A CPU that can self-destruct performing legal, documented operations is a buggy CPU. That goes for any other hardware, too.
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Re:Various options. (Score:5, Interesting)
CISC eventually collapsed precisely because of this. RISC was faster - far faster - without the composite instructions. Hybrids, like the Pentium series, have since developed, where the underlying architecture is RISC and the composite instructions are emulated by being split into much simpler ones. So far, so good, so what? You still have a translation layer. You still have that decomposition. That's not free, you know. It takes time.
So why do this at all, and not have a pure RISC system? Well, many CPU manufacturers asked the same question. And decided to do exactly that. Have a pure RISC architecture. They generally do the same amount of real work with a fifth of the clockspeed of a CISC/RISC hybrid - so they run cooler and you can pack more into less space.
Why don't Intel and AMD do this? Oh, they'd love to! The Itanic proved many things, though, one of which is that the 8086-style CISC layer has to remain. The customers have too much legacy software now. Not only are consumers locked into Intel's architecture, so is Intel! There's nothing they can do to escape, unless they make a chip that has some cores on the old design and some on a new one. But who is going to buy a processor that costs more and does less (for now)? Nobody. Thank you.
This should be the lesson that companies learn from the IT industry (but won't): Too much lock-in locks the company in as well, making necessary changes and corrections impossible. Given enough time and enough failures to change, the company will destroy itself.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the only things tying linux to certain architectures are flash, nvidia, ati e
Re:Various options. (Score:5, Interesting)
The main reason this is actually slower is the ordering of instructions. Intel chips have out-of-order execution that lets them run micro-ops from instructions in a different order that will make things faster and make more use of all the parts of the processor.
If a compiler could do this instead of the processor, by ordering the micro-ops itself, Intel wouldn't need die space for out-of-order execution. The space could be used for more cache or to squeeze more cores in.
Also the compiler would be able to do better optimization because it has the bigger picture of what's coming up, and it has more time to do the optimization because it doesn't do it on the fly.
Intel make excellent processors even if they do have to do CISC-RISC translation, and they still beat any competing RISC processor hands down (except in specialized applications like supercomputers or Sun benchmarks). This isn't because CISC is better than RISC, it's just because the difference isn't nearly as large as you make out, and Intel has a massive R&D budget that offsets any performance decrease and then some.
If Intel really felt it was necessary to move to a new processor they would. They talked MS into using Itanium for high end apps so I'm sure they could push a transition if they wanted.
They could include a Rosetta style software translator for old x86 binaries, and perhaps include an x86 translator on-die (like Itanium 1 did). The reason they don't is because it wouldn't give such a large boost, and would be relatively expensive, when they can get larger speed boosts for less by going for smaller processes and optimizing micro-ops.
It wouldn't be as big a transition as you make out, and it wouldn't give as big of a performance increase as you make out. It would be better if they had gone with RISC, but not that much better.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Executing multiple instructions within a single "opcode" - and then developing a compiler to pre-determine the best path was about the STUPIDEST idea I've ever heard. Just think about it... a compiler has no idea about the REAL conditions at runtime.
A compiler can optimize a single program thread - but can't optimize for multi-threading, multi-processing, or mixed mode execution between the OS and the applic
Irony (Score:5, Funny)
Commodity is a relative term... (Score:4, Insightful)
Although I submit it would be really cool to just manufacture these things in my garage.
You don't have to fab it (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Commodity is a relative term... (Score:4, Interesting)
by allowing and encouraging competition and progress, sun is keeping computing a growth market for a long, long time. sun just has to have the intellectual clout to keep their head-start (i can give you the source code, but do you know what to do with it?). it's an interesting, very honest business strategy, and the free-software licenses used will keep it honest.
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AMD and Intel just shit their pants (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, figure the UltraSPARC T2 is better than that.
Re:AMD and Intel just shit their pants (Score:4, Interesting)
I see a 1 GHz T1 doing quite well compared to a 2.4 GHz Opteron and a 3 GHz Xeon. Things have improved on the Intel front, but the T2 should do quite well for the workloads it is designed for. Not only does it have more threads (and I think a better memory controller), but now it has one FPU per core instead of 1 per chip. That means 8x as many FPUs. That was the real weak point and now it has been addressed.
I can't wait to see benchmarks of this chip. It is far more interesting than "the same chip for 3 years ago, now 0.3 GHz faster" or "now with one more micro-op fuser and a 2% better branch decoder."
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Power consumption? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want super high performance and super low power
Top of the like will have high power draw.
You have low power options that are pretty dang fast. The trade off is just up to you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You have a short little span of attention. When Intel first hit 60W with the original Pentium there was a huge outcry about its outrageous power consumption, and it hardly performed any better than a 100MHz 486, either. After a quick die shrink, the next version wasn't so bad. Now Intel sells the Core Duo at 65W as a major innovation in power management. After Intel's Prescott, it's almost impossible for anything else to look bad. But really, should a product that never deserved to be made in the first
Which GPL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And yes if you look at the map on the opensparc.net page (when they get some quota back after being slashdotted) you'll see they are getting a vast amount of interest from China, where I gather a company is already producing an OpenSPARC T1-derived ch
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It is GPLv2:
http://opensparc-t2.sunsource.net/ [sunsource.net]
Re:Which GPL? And Sun's future... (Score:5, Interesting)
It actually matters a lot because Sun probably owns a lot of patents.
Too true.
If I've got this right: Under GPL3 anybody with foundry access could make the chip or a derivative, with no more patent issues than Sun itself would have. But under GPL2 they might have to enter separate license agreements to actually implement it.
= = = =
Presuming this release does make the chip open to anybody absent further licensing, it will be interesting to see how it affects Sun's future.
On one hand it means any company that wants to could build the chip and sell it in competition with Sun (which has borne the development costs on the SPARC series - but recouped much of them already).
On the other hand, they have a number of advantages: Already up and fabbing, deep understanding of the chip, etc.
Further, one big source of resistance to adoption of their chips is the concern for what happens if Sun abandons the line, stops developing it, goes belly-up, or closes up again. With a perpetual license to others to build this chip and make improvements on it, that's no longer an issue. Even if Sun went belly-up and left them with no other sources, a big enough company with a product based on this chip could even commission the fabrication of its own chips, rather than twisting in the wind for lack of supplies. So such a company can design this chip into their product line and buy it from Sun without betting their own company on a possibly weak supplier.
Let's see Intel or AMD compete with that that. B-)
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Upgrade complete (Score:3, Funny)
Oh wait...
Re:Upgrade complete (Score:4, Funny)
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FAQ on performance of this puppy (Score:5, Informative)
Linky on numbers [sun.com]
Summary:
* This puppy comes ahead of Power5 and top-dog (till now) Power6
* Highest single CPU integer and floating point performance
Oh, and it has 2 10G network interfaces on chip... and EIGHT crypto cores to keep them running full throttle too. All this with 8 core each with its own floating point unit and 8 threads.
Oh and BTW, Ubuntu guys just booted their distro on this puppy
So yeah, it runs Linux (too)!
pfft (Score:4, Funny)
I bet its the only chip they've shipped this week.
I'm not sure if people are getting this. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not the point. Here's the point:
1: Sun's processors are a niche market. People don't use them because they're harder to use than cheap commodity processors from Intel. Why are they harder to use? Because not enough people use them to create the kind of economic ecosystem that drives down the price of using the processors.
2: All over Asia are chip factories that make low-end embedded devices, RAM chips, and so on. Factories that are owned by companies that don't have the cash on hand to do the R&D to design their own processors to compete with Intel.
3: By GPL'ing their chip designs, Sun lets all those Asian factories produce chips that perform like Intels but cost even less. This gives people an extra incentive to switch away from Intel and to create the very economic ecosystem the processor needs.
4. Next, Sun releases enhanced versions of the chip that aren't GPL'ed. Chip consumers can now choose from fast commodity processors or more expensive deluxe models - that are still code compatible.
And Sun can repeat steps #3 and #4 as often as they like, feeding their previous generation designs to the GPL audience as their newest designs hit the market.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
8 cores, 8 threads each.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As another poster has pointed out: You build a core with multiple copies of the register set and replicate (or take turns on) the associated instruction-dispatching logic.
But these multiple CPUs share a common set of arithmetic/logic execution units, along with arbitration logic. Different threads will be doing different things at any given instant, and thus using different sections of the ALU.
The arbitration logic decides which thread gets which hunk of ALU at any
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Abandoware open source (Score:5, Informative)
Well, apart from Simply RISC [srisc.com], who used the design to build a single-core chip (S1) for embedded applications.
And Polaris Micro [polarismicro.com] in China, who are doing the same.
And David Miller & friends, who made Linux run on it.
And Canonical who support Ubuntu running on it [ubuntu.com].
And the other Linux distros picking it up.
And... Oh, sorry, you were just trolling, right?
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Re:Abandoware open source (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Did I read this right? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how many BogoMIPS that is equivalent to.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. You, the end user, can modify the processor to the extent that is possible for the technology involved. Since a processor is physical hardware, that means the "compilation" phase for modification involves a microprocessor fab. If you don't hav
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm... that makes me want a dual-CPU system with one T1 and one Cell. Imagine if they were both Hypertransport-compatible...