Sun Niagara 2 CPU Now Open Source

downix writes "Late last night Sun Microsystems announced the immediate availability of the UltraSPARC T2, also known as the Niagara 2 CPU. While we all might not have a silicon fab in the basement, the access to this source code reaffirms Sun's commitment to open source, and in addition gives us FPGA-lovers something new to play with. The source code can be downloaded (with registration) from OpenSPARC.net. Already the previously open sourced T1 has spawned spin-off projects, such as the Simple RISC S1."

Re:Open Source friendly?

[georgewilliamherbert]

I wonder what they'd do if someone started selling processors based on the information they just released.

The RTL code (Verilog) is GPLed:
http://www.opensparc.net/faqs/licensing/ [opensparc.net]

Other people have built and are shipping product with the prior T1 version, the SimpleRISC folks:
http://www.srisc.com/?s1 [srisc.com]

The licensing pretty much says "Here, have it, have fun!"

Re:Home fabbing

[GwaihirBW]

See the sibling post below parent . . . this figure is way low for modern processors. There's a reason that there aren't many upstart processor manufacturers. The fabs are expensive and require significant expertise to work out all the fiddly problems that tend to crop up when dealing with a 65 nm process.

Take, for example, the recent $2.5 Billion Intel plant in China [cnbc.com].

Re:Home fabbing

[s_p_oneil]

All you need are Shrinky Dinks, a printer, and a toaster oven. ;-)

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/1940203&threshold=-1 [slashdot.org]

Re:Pics?

[riff420]

This is not the Something Awful Forums. FYAD.

Re:When is Open Source actually news?

[JebusIsLord]

It means some other (large) company can take the design, improve it, release a product based on it without paying huge fees, and then contribute their changes back to the public domain. So no, it doesn't help joe user, but it does help industry players save on R&D, which is still a good thing.

Re:What about patents?

[downix]

Only if said company did not pay for the license. Incidentally, the basic SPARC license is $100.

Re:Open Source friendly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun licensed SPARC to Texas Instruments, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu and used their chips in their machines.

I've head the OSS guy at Sun say that they are happy for anyone to build them and they'll be happy to buy them from whoever gives them the best deal.

Re:Is the hardware any good though?

[_merlin]

It's basically a multi-core barrel processor - it switches threads on every cycle (similar to the old Cray and CDC gear). This gives it time to fetch data while other threads are being serviced to reduce the likelihood of cache misses. This makes it ideal for highly parallel workloads, like web application servers and multi-user database servers. But the workload needs to be highly parallel for it to perform: a quad core Niagara needs at least sixteen threads to be fully utilised. It has weak floating point, too, since web application and database workloads don't usually depend heavily on this. It's pretty much useless for a typical desktop or workstation workload.

Re:Is the hardware any good though?

[downix]

In my experience, in a single threaded task, an AMD or Intel of the same spec will blow it away. Crank up the threads, and something remarkable happens. The AMD/Intel stays running the same speed, this thing speeds up. Run 4 threads simultaneously, and this thing is running circles around similar spec'd AMD/Intel, and doing it in a lot less silicon, which means theoretically a lower price. Think of it as a marathon runner vs a sprinter. In short term races, the sprinter comes out on top. In a long distance (heavy load) race, the marathon runner comes out on top.

Re:21st century business plan

[dupup]

I do wonder how Sun is going to make money the next century.

Disclosure: I work for Sun in their software division. This is not secret information, but Sun plans on making money in the next century by selling hardware. Lots and lots of hardware. Why buy it from Sun when you can get it cheaper from elsewhere? That's the other part of Sun's super secret master plan: support contracts. Business do tend to buy from Sun if they have already done so. Maybe it's just easier, maybe it makes the original decision to buy from Sun look better, I don't know. But Sun still sells $billions in hardware each year. The software revenues are a whole lot less.

Re:Is the hardware any good though?

[EvanED]

Then I guess one area that open source hardware nerds can work on is to rework the FPU to be faster.

It's not so much that the FPU is slow as, at least on the T1 (Niagra 1), there was only one of them for the whole chip. The applications the Niagra targets don't really need FPU power (how much FP work does /.'s webserver do?), and Sun is fairly close to production of the Rock, a processor that in some sense is similar to the Niagra but will also have much heavier FP capabilities. (In a development that is pretty exciting for the architecture people down the hall, the Rock will be the first commercial system supporting transactional memory.)

Re:Home fabbing

[alienw]

I'd say you can do significantly cheaper, at least for small die sizes. I have seen prices as low as $20k for 100+ chips (on a multiproject wafer). Of course, this pretty much depends on the process and on how long you can wait. And the chip layout/synthesis/verification software costs several hundred thousand bucks per year per seat.

Re:Is it really released? I can't find a link

[mako1138]

Yeah, it's there.

http://www.opensparc.net/opensparc-t2/downloads.html [opensparc.net]

Be warned, the 233MB file decompresses to about 1.5 GB.

Re:Openbsd

[AKAImBatman]

The Microprocessor's instruction set has been open for decades. It's all the hardware around the SPARC processor that OpenBSD had trouble getting info on. Sun used to make a huge number of hardware devices for which they provided no documentation on the internals. Of course, these days, most of it is pretty standard. But back then, hearing words like "SBUS" used to make people shudder.

Re:Is the hardware any good though?

[afidel]

On the T2 there is one FPU per core, the new FPU's are also accessed in 6 cycles vs the 40 of the T1 and the full ISA is done in hardware (some rare media instructions were emulated in the T1 FPU). The biggest win for the typical customer though is the enhanced crypto performance, now you can do SSL at the rate that the T1 could do normal HTTP.