Sun Moves Into Commodity Silicon 236
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.
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Informative)
Because MAJC [wikipedia.org], picoJava [wikipedia.org], aJile [ajile.com], and Jazelle [wikipedia.org] don't count, right?
Re:Details? (Score:3, Informative)
8 cores, 8 threads each.
Re:Which GPL? (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 chip for embedded use.
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?
Re:FPGAs (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, someone just did:
More details on Simply RISC's [srisc.com] web site.
Re:Abandoware open source (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Which GPL? (Score:3, Informative)
It is GPLv2:
http://opensparc-t2.sunsource.net/ [sunsource.net]
Benchmark is *BOGUS* - Sun chip was *old* (Score:2, Informative)
How well will that Intel architecture scale to over 4 CPUs, anyway. At least AMD can do that.
Re:Did I read this right? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how many BogoMIPS that is equivalent to.
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)!
Re:GPL and chips (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Details? (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 given moment. And some threads will be stalled waiting for data and won't need any ALU function at all. Of course when more threads want a particular kind of execution unit than are available, one or more of them must stall. But by having the right number of copies of the commonly-used types of execution units you can keep a number of threads running at or near full speed most of the time and the ALU components mostly busy, with much less silicon than if each thread had a full-blown CPU and most of the ALU logic was idle at any given moment. With less silicon logic you can put things closer together and speed it up still more.
This approach has been around since Cray was at Control Data.
Re:Power consumption? (Score:3, Informative)