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."

Home fabbing

[QuantumG]

While we all might not have a silicon fab in the basement

Does anyone? About how much would such a luxury cost?

Re:

[AuMatar]

Oh, a few tens of millions. Not too much.

If you were making embedded systems you could afford to pay a fab to make a batch, and likely save money over buying a new CPU from Sun/Intel/AMD. But this kind of thing isn't possile or cost effective for one off runs.

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:

[FooAtWFU]

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].

Yeah, but the Intel plant is designed to create thousands, millions, of low-power / high-performance devices. A hobbyist might be content with just a few.

Re:

[irondonkey]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fab_(semiconductors) [wikipedia.org] Wiki says over 1 billion, probably close, given the relative rarity of them even amongst commercial companies.

Re:

[QuantumG]

Another side effect of the cost has been the challenge to make use of older fabs. For many companies these older fabs are useful for producing designs for unique markets, such as embedded processors, flash memory, and microcontrollers. However for companies with more limited product lines, it's often best to either rent out the fab, or close it entirely. This is due to the tendency of the cost of upgrading an existing fab to produce devices requiring newer technology to exceed the cost of a completely new fab.

So it sounds like the second hand obsolete market for fab equipment is a real steal.. and with the industry moving to 300mm wafer sizes soon..........

Re:Home fabbing

[tlhIngan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fab_(semiconductors) Wiki says over 1 billion, probably close, given the relative rarity of them even amongst commercial companies.

A billion is low-end fabs. High end cutting edge or even near-cutting edge technology costs much more. Maybe a billion for "old-school" tech like 130nm.

No, your best bet is to just pay the few million to have someone fab it for you - there are very few companies that have their own fabs and can do it inhouse (e.g., Intel, IBM, AMD, Freescale (Motorola), Samsung, Toshiba), at least, cutting edge fabs. Low end fabs can be had for cheap (1um and larger), which is great if you don't particularly care about density (e.g., Gemplus - those smartcards have HUGE silicon for 32k memory and not much more).

Most companies are fabless. They contract out the fab work to places like TSMC (amongst others - they're all well known). These include even heavyweight giants like nVidia, Altera, Xilinx and such. The only real downside is that delays can happen if machinery breaks down, or everyone submits a fab order simultaneously that causes backups at the fab and thus delays shipments. The turnaround time (from tapeout to getting chips back) can be 3 months or more. Luckily, most people test their designs out on FPGAs first to work out their bugs before committing them to silicon. Even places like Intel use computer simulation, discrete circuits, FPGAs, and such before they fab it out to their own fabs just because of the turnaround time.

Of course, what I want to know is what's the smallest FPGA one can put this on and still have something workable. (Where things like bus timings and memory clocks still in the realm of "practical" and "in spec").

Re:Home fabbing

[FrankSchwab]

Actually, the cost for one-offs is significantly lower than your estimate.
By using a Shuttle run, where the fab batches together a bunch of designs and runs them through using a single mask set, you can get 20 or so instances of a 130 nm design for roughly $100K. Of course, this assumes that you've already done the layout and verification steps yourself...

Re:

[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:

[afidel]

The software's expensive but it's not THAT expensive. Four years ago when I supported Cisco the cost per seat for the design software was in the mid five figure range and support/updates were 20% annual. Kind of made workstation pricing irrelevant, when the designer is making 6 figures and the software is that expensive a $25K workstation that would be amortized over 2-3 years was cheap.

Re:

[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:

[Anonymous Coward]

Look here for fab costs.
http://www.mosis.com/ [mosis.com]

Packaging is crucial to making the thing work too, however.

CAD tools to convert the RTL into GDS is also very expensive.

Re: Home fabbing

[the_kanzure]

An email I just sent to QuantumG:

On Wednesday 12 December 2007, QuantumG wrote:
> Maybe one day it won't be silly :)

Absolutely. I'm doing some research in the background. Try this:

Litho-history [lithoguru.com] [PDF]
Simple Lithography [blogspot.com] [blog]
News story, semirelevant [news.com]

query: lenses circuits wax Intel
result: MY OWN PAGE *argh* (re: analytical instrumentation)
I also get: "Bryan's page on semiconductor manufacturing" which is also,
alas, me. But the page contains just as far as I've been able to get so
far: how t

Re:

[monsted]

How can we achieve fabbing@home?

You go to playboy.com, get out your lotion and tissues and... oh, faBBing... Never mind me.

I just witnessed a minor miracle, I think

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone corrected the spelling of "Niagra" to "Niagara" - ScuttleMonkey, if it was you, I congratulate you!

Honestly :) Good job!

Re:

[eulernet]

Yes, and I read Viagra. It's time to go to bed !

Re:

[Enry]

Niagara Falls!

Slowly I turned....

Openbsd

[Anonymous Coward]

I can remember when the OpenBSD crew was having issues getting sparc specs. My how times have changed.

Re:

[Dan Ost]

I suspect that this would never have happened if it weren't for the efforts made by the OpenBSD crew to get information out of Sun.

Any insiders want to post anonymously about how we got here with Sun?

Re:

[fm6]

I doubt if the OpenBSD thing has anything to do with this. It's more in response to the fact that it's hard to sell SPARC-based systems as long as the CPU is perceived as a Sun-proprietary technology. So Sun opens up the SPARC design, and this allows them to claim that their chips are "commodity", just like AMD and Intel's.

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.

This is...

[larpon]

Sun Viagra 2 CPU... Ok.. I need glasses

Re:This is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun Viagra 2 CPU... Ok.. I need glasses

Sun should market it as such, after all, you never want your server to go down.

Re:

[geschild]

"Sun Viagra 2 CPU... Ok.. I need glasses"

I didn't know far-sightedness is a known side-effect of V1@9r@?

Blindness [bbc.co.uk] is, though...

Time to see a medical professional? ;D

Relevance to Joe Consumer

[flowerp]

I kind of wonder what the relevance of the availability of the
blueprint of a modern multithreaded special-purpose server
CPU means to the average Joe.

Probably not much, unless Joe has got an degree with a specialization
in computer science or electrical engineering.

Re:Relevance to Joe Consumer

[forkazoo]

I kind of wonder what the relevance of the availability of the
blueprint of a modern multithreaded special-purpose server
CPU means to the average Joe.

Probably not much, unless Joe has got an degree with a specialization
in computer science or electrical engineering.

The vast majority of (bachelors level) computer science degrees don't involve anywhere near enough focus on hardware issues for the "blueprint" of their CPU to be of any real use. The low level source of a CPU is of direct use to a vanishingly small subset of people. But, so is the source of the Linux kernel. I've never submitted a patch to the kernel. I wouldn't know where to start, frankly. And, I'm moderately qualified to do so, having done a fair amount of C, and a bit of embedded programming. I'm certainly more qualified to tinker with the kernel than I am with CPU source.

But, that sort of isn't the point. The fact that you and I wouldn't know where to start with something like that doesn't change the fact that such people do exist. And, there are some people who can't do anything with it, but are really curious to know more about what it is, and this may be the spark that makes them decide to learn. You and I may get the result of one of those guys having access to this. so, even though my own project plans won't be influenced by the availablity, I do expect that you and I will be effected by it indirectly.

Re:

[init100]

You and I may get the result of one of those guys having access to this. so, even though my own project plans won't be influenced by the availablity, I do expect that you and I will be effected by it indirectly.

Which, incidentally, also applies to open source software. Many people sneer at open source software, saying that they and 99% of all people wouldn't know what to do with it anyway, so why should they care. You just wrote a nice explanation for those people.

Re:

[NovaX]

While software folks may not understand the hardware world, its quite sad that hardware folks rarely understand the software side as well. One of the most challenging jobs, which gets little attention, is software-hardware codesign. Those applications, like Cadence VLSI suite, are quite challenging as they require EE expertise to implement features while software mastery to develop the product. This results in very advanced, but also very cryptic, software stacks.

I don't think open source hardware is too i

Re:

[spir0]

While software folks may not understand the hardware world, its quite sad that hardware folks rarely understand the software side as well.

Not any more. back when coding apps/games/demos in assembly was the thing to do, you had *plenty* of guys that knew the hardware and software inside and out. And while they're only 30-40 years old now, it's just a redundant practise.

Re:

[nebosuke]

Not really. All serious competitors in demo competitions know the ISA and performance characteristics of the target architecture very well, but that is nowhere near knowing the hardware 'inside and out'. It's the difference between being very familiar with the API vs. the actual code implementing a library.

Re:

[spir0]

the C64's and early Amigas were pretty static, hardware-wise. so once you knew what the CPU and custom chips did, you knew the hardware.

Commodore released excellent books in the way of the ROM Kernel Manuals for the Amiga.

what was the topic about? :)

Re:

[RobBebop]

I've never submitted a patch to the kernel. I wouldn't know where to start, frankly.

I have also never submitted a kernel patch, but I want to try to answer your excuse. Start at kernel.org [kernel.org]. Read through the Bugzilla Open Issues [kernel.org]. I have read this book [oreilly.com] and it does an excellent job introducing the tools and techniques needed to work with the kernel.

To attack the meat of the article (Open Source Sun CPU), it is valuable because it gives the specialized community a rallying point to get behind. There might be less than 100,000 people qualified to do anything meaningful with this... but

Re:

[nurb432]

It might end up driving costs down for alternatives to intel/amd.

It might not too, but its a least something to consider.

What about patents?

[LingNoi]

I noticed they released it under the GPL 2 (or is the chip design released under a different license?).

Does this mean they could attack a company that started selling their processor or one based on this information with a patent?

Re:

[downix]

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

Re:

[TheRaven64]

I noticed they released it under the GPL 2

A license which you obviously have not read. Had you read it, you would see that Clause 7 specifically answers your question in the negative.

FPGA Huggers

[Doc Ruby]

in addition gives us FPGA-lovers something new to play with

How big an FPGA would be required to run this? Can you really download the configs and run it on an FPGA at a reasonable speed? Which Xilinx model?

How about running Linux on that simulated Niagara2, like you can uCLinux on a Microblaze [wikipedia.org]? The exciting part would be replacing parts of the OS, like the TCP/IP stack, with "HW" configs for really high performance, customized per app. None of your processes use some dozen instructions? Drop their microcode in favor of a faster multiplier...

Re:

[nurb432]

If you have to ask, i bet they are out of your price range. The big ones are NOT cheap.

But ya, it can be done.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

you need a Virtex. Expect to spend around $1200-$3000 on a kit to run a single core (like the S-RISC). You can't fit the full 8-core design in any single FPGA. And there is a huge performance and complexity factor of spreading a design out onto multiple chips.

The Niagra is already pretty optimal in terms of reducing the area required for unused instructions. And there are very few instructions that aren't used in a typical kernel+apps on a Sparc. Also microcode doesn't take up much space, especially if you

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

The best apps for FPGA are glue logic. So if you want to lego together different digital chips, FPGA is a great way to go. And then there's a lot more, which your SW skills will help with. Take the plunge and do something new. There's plenty left to do that no one has yet before.

Re:

[hjf]

you need to check your facts a little. I've seen FPGAs inside HDTV sets and Cisco routers (actually some Cisco WICs but that's not the point). And considering that FPGAs can work well over 500MHz and give you 600 Billion MACs/s (multiply-and-accumulate, the basic DSP operation), that's far away from your 7400 and 4500 families.

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

How does anything you just said contradict anything that I just said?

Re:

[hjf]

Well, you said it in the typical "Macs are only good for design" sort of way. I was just filling in for you.

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

No, I said that glue logic is the best FPGA app. Which is probably exactly what the FPGA you saw in a TV was doing. I was encouraging someone with an interest in FPGA, who started in electronics because they thought they could just plug digital chips together like lego, to try that natural application of FPGA.

What you did was "make a mistake" by converting "the best" into "the only". Check your facts before snidely telling me to do so.

Re:

[Muad'Dave]

Doc Ruby, I'd love to have an offline chat with you re: FPGAs and their use as combinatorial problem solvers. Please drop me an email at dtiller (at) captechNOSPAMPLEASEventures (dot) com. Remove NOSPAMPLEASE for great justice. Thanks!

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

Well, that is why I also mentioned MicroBlaze in this thread. But I was encouraging someone to start, whose original interest in electronics was based on "pluggable logic", which is a good intro to FPGAs.

Re:

[hjf]

Come on, it's just $150 for the Spartan-3E starter kit (xilinx.com)

Also, it seems like writing a C program, but it's not. Remember that VHDL doesn't run line-by-line, most of the time is running all the lines at once. It's a description language, not a programming language.

Re:

[imgod2u]

If you're writing Verilog or VHDL like you're doing a C program, you're doing it wrong. It's actually not very complicated to figure out the translation if you stick with RTL constructs. The key thing to remember is that those HDL languages provide more than the description of gates. They provide programming behavior so that you can create models and testbenches to test your gates. *BUT* that also means that you have to actively avoid using those constructs when describing real hardware. If you limit y

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

There are already "IP core" component configs available for some things, like TCP/IP, that some SW implements in instructions. So in fact the "pipe dream" of customizing HW to accelerate SW is entirely realistic. And when FPGA reconfig speeds increase, the dream of reconfiguring as a process demands such HW will also eventually come true. But it all requires people who dream those dreams to work on it, even when other people discourage the future.

Re:

[imgod2u]

The embedded systems market is flooded with FPGA-based designs. One does not need to redesign a custom TCP/IP stack. IP can be bought (or downloaded) for it and you simply glue the pieces together. The performance-centric FPGA's do draw quite a bit of power for what they offer, but if your power budget allows it, there's no reason not to.

The primary reason why FPGA's aren't used in things such as network cards has nothing to do with technical feasibility but rather cost. ASICs are significantly lower-co

FPGA lovers

[nurb432]

Ya, we all have those HUGE ( read : expensive ) FPGAs required to implement something like this.

Many of us are lucky to fit a Z80 into what we have.

Re:

[nahpets77]

You may not be able to use them at home, but most university labs have expensive FPGAs lying around collecting dust. This is good news for people doing research at universities, where they often like to tinker with the hardware to try out new ideas.

Re:

[marcansoft]

I can fit the entire PACMAN arcade board (including the Z80) inside my S3E. 25% use, not counting RAM blocks, which are all in use because I'm too lazy to switch the code over to use an external ROM for the code. I have the $150 Spartan 3E Starter Kit.

Z80s aren't that big.

Re:

[nurb432]

I was being a bit sarcastic with the Z80 comment. You can fit an entire Sinclair Spectrum in medium sized chip.

Government Technology Embargoes

[BearRanger]

Granted, you can't build a fab in your basement. But I imagine governments don't have this problem.

What are the implications of Sun doing this? There are countries that wouldn't be allowed to buy their finished Niagara servers that could now, given time, reproduce their technology. Doesn't this make a mockery of the U.S. technology embargo against certain countries?

Perhaps I'm simply missing something, but if AMD can get into hot water over their processors showing up in Iran why does Sun get a pass for

Re:

[Waffle Iron]

That's easy to fix. All they have to do is put a comment at the top of the CPU source code:

/* Assumed main clock frequency: 25MHz */

But seriously, this design info is just about useless without a $Billion fab full of equipment that these countries also aren't supposed to get. But why would they bother with all that when they can just buy quad core consumer PCs that rival the performance of these chips, and which are available to them on the open market from most any country other than the USA?

New GPL can of worms opening...

[droopycom]

It is going to be interesting to see how the GPL is applied to RTL code.

For example, what constitutes derivatives and what can be considered mere-aggregation.

Also can I license an RTL block from another vendor and combine the two in a new chip ?

OSFPPC!!

[syousef]

While we all might not have a silicon fab in the basement

You don't? How tragic. I'm afraid you'll have to hand in your geek card. In the meantime I wonder if the OLPC guys would consider a OSFPPC (One Silicon Fab Plant Per Child) program.

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

[whoever57]

I searched for a link to an actual download (yes, I have a use for the code). Opensparc.net just refers to the "Sun download Center" (no link). Searching on Sun's site, I can only turn up OpenSPARC T1 and not T2.

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.

All right...

[sootman]

who's the considerate jerk who tagged this story 'thanks'? We don't work that way here at Slashdot, buddy. When a company does something like this, you're supposed to tag it 'whocares' or 'toolittletoolate' or something equally dismissive. Damn noobs...

we all might not have silicon fab in the basement

[unity100]

not yet pal, just not yet. you'll see.

Sun is the new Bell Labs

[teknopurge]

I've had this position for about 2 years now.

IMO, Sun is one of the only companies left innovating.

-Google is just rehashing old ideas.(Gmail? come on....I had webmail 10 years ago.)
-Oracle(eh... RDBMS v45.2 anyone?)
-IBM(If I see one more pointless black-and-white commercial about "ideas" I'm going to scream. IBM should listen to their marketing department and instead of telling us to "Stop thinking, start doing" they should create something that isn't AIX)

And, I will be the lone voice and dare to say that Microsoft, yes them, has a few teams that are starting to 'get it'. Apple is doing a great job with human-computer interaction.

Show me new, for I am tired of your old.

Bootstrapping issue

[iabervon]

So I was all set to download the source and build some chips in my basement fab, but then I looked at the system requirements. It's only for Solaris, and worse, it's only for SPARC. How the heck am I supposed to run this software so I can build a CPU when I need that same CPU to run the software? Obviously, Sun is going to have a lot of SPARCs sitting around from earlier development, so they wouldn't have this problem themselves, but they should have thought of it, at least, and provided binaries for Cell o

They wouldn't have done it if N2 was competitive

[Glasswire]

Sorry, I mean I love that they're giving silicon designs out the world, but if there was any really important innovation in the intellectual property behind the Niagara II that would give Sun an advantage in the marketplace they would not be exposing it to all their competitors.

The only business reason I can imagine that Sun would do this is the hope that lot's of Niagara foundries would bloom and thereby cut their costs for sourcing the part.

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!"

Is the hardware any good though?

[LingNoi]

Awesome, do you happen to know how well these things work compared to other processors?

My only experience with Sun hardware is from the slow out dated machines we have running here.

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:

[jd]

Then I guess one area that open source hardware nerds can work on is to rework the FPU to be faster. If people can load the files into an FPGA and get comparable results on maths-heavy software to a full hardware implementation of the T2 as it stands, I would imagine the scientific computing folk would go for the FPGA solution as it would be cheaper so they could build more nodes for the same amount of money.

Sun is a lot of things, some unprintable, but stupid isn't one of them. If it can be shown that a

Re:

[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 pr

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.

Re:

[georgewilliamherbert]

Sun's late-2008 T3 "Victoria Falls" model will include a 2-way interconnect with chips that otherwise spec-wise appear to be T2 cores.

See http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/datasheet.pdf [sun.com]

Not clear what the interconnect model is yet.

I personally would like to see the open source T2 re-released with the PCI-X and 10 gig ethernet, as Sun hints they will do once licensing is fixed:

Note - OpenSPARC T2 currently does not include PCI-Express and 10Gigabit
Ethernet design implementation due to current legal

Re:

[jd]

Since the core is software-defined, there should be relatively little difficulty in defining a bus abstraction and then having modules for HyperTransport, PCI Express, or any other bus they care to support, where perhaps only one module can be included at "compile-time". Why go for something this complex? It makes things future-proof. If a new bus or a new revision of a bus becomes the "in-thing", you only change the module. The chip architecture remains fundamentally the same. (Both HyperTransport and PCI

Re:Is the hardware any good though?

[dr2chase]

(disclaimer, I work for Sun, but I manage to be completely clueless about many things, including the official names of Sun's products)

Niagara 1, had one FPU per chip. Niagara 2, has more than one.

The way you pose it -- doesn't perform unless you can find the parallelism -- is not the right way. Some clever person found a market where there was parallelism, and that turns the problem around. "Given that I have all this work to do, what's the throughput per watt?" Niagara wins there. And it happened that those people, or a lot of them, didn't have a burning need for floating point.

Or to use a lame car analogy, a schoolbus is no good unless you can find 32 kids to haul, whereas a minicooper is cool and zippy with only two. But if you regularly have 32 kids to haul, and some people do, you want a schoolbus, and a minicooper is not very efficient.

Re:

[dr2chase]

Well, product names, I am especially clueless. I have few clues about other things.

Seriously, when I ran a workstealing benchmark (which is all about interprocessor synchronization) it ran just as fast at 32 threads as it did at 1. The 1-thread performance is nothing to shout about, but at 16, it's suddenly kicking the ass of every other computer I can get my hands on (because of all the synchronization) and it can do that all the way out to 32. I have heard, through the grapevine, that the Niagara 1 (an

Re:

[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 dis

Re:

[EvanED]

Sun's in sort of a weird position. They have largely embraced OSS (witness the fact that they open sourced most notably SPARC, OpenSolaris, and Java), but I think are not entirely at ease with it. From at least one point of view, they have a lot to lose from Linux taking over for Solaris. OpenSolaris is also under the CDDL, which is not GPL-compatible. I wouldn't be surprised if the incompatibility is viewed as a benefit by a lot of Sun, rather than a bug.

So they may not be perfect, but they are a heck of a

Re:

[davecb]

I suspect the more stringent licenses are for things that can be embraced and extended, possibly by a particular well-known competitor to Java (;-))

--dave

Re:

[init100]

OpenSolaris is also under the CDDL, which is not GPL-compatible.

Isn't it also released under the GPLv3? Anyway, I'm pretty certain that they chose both CDDL and GPLv3 expressly to be incompatible with the Linux kernel, which could otherwise have all their nice features (like ZFS) leaving OpenSolaris with no advantage over Linux.

Re:Open Source friendly?

[QuantumG]

I'd love to know where people like you get this kind of insight from.. Sun is an open source company.. they always have been. They were doing open source before "the revolution" even happened. They're more than "at ease" with it, they have some of the oldest living open source hackers on payroll.

As for this whole "oh noes!! Linux might takeover from Solaris!!" crap, why do people continue to ascribe the Microsoft world view - everything and everyone is a competitor - to other companies? Sun and IBM and every other normal company (read: not a monopoly) has one business strategy: give the customer what they want. If the customer wants Linux, Sun will sell them Linux. If the customer wants Solaris, Sun will sell them Solaris. If the customer wants Intel or AMD or SPARC, Sun will sell them that. IBM will also sell you Linux or Aix or Intel or AMD or SPARC.. if you want to pay them for that, that's what you'll get. It's only Microsoft who seems to think they can dictate the solutions to the customers instead of the other way around.

Re:

[Anne Thwacks]

I AM the customer, I want Sun to support their own video cards. I want them to support the Creator3D and the ATI rage cards they sell with Sparc64 systems so that they work properly in text mode as well as grapics mode at boot time in the OpenBoot prom. Not, I would argue, very demanding.

(Actually I'd like them supported on OpenBSD, which they now claim to support, as well)

Re:

[mha]

"to want" is defined as "willing to pay" in economy terms. Should I start a looooong list of all the things I would like? This is so silly... are you willing to spend an afternoon working my garden in exchange for the small favor you want form me - THAT'S the question, or do you want something from me without doing anything in return?

This is what I HATE about open source. Too many kids grow up with that "I get everything for free" mentality. And don't try to argue they give back to open source - what's the

Re:

[Raenex]

why do people continue to ascribe the Microsoft world view - everything and everyone is a competitor - to other companies? Sun and IBM and every other normal company (read: not a monopoly) has one business strategy: give the customer what they want.

I think you need to remove your anti-Microsoft colored glasses. Every company is aware of their competitors. Every company would love to lock their customers in to proprietary solutions. That's the normal position. IBM was sued for being a monopoly decades ago. Sun competes with Linux. IBM embraced Linux and Sun embraced open source only because they were losing out in their old ways, and they wanted to ride the new waves. They both still have proprietary products. Microsoft only stands out from Su

Re:

[QuantumG]

Not really. Obviously they would prefer that the solutions they have expertise in be the ones wanted by the customer, so they can best serve the customer, but that's about it.

Re:

[tcampb01]

Yes, I think you are wrong on this.

The processor is open-source (OpenSPARC), Sun's own operating system port on the processor is also open-source (OpenSolaris), and of course Linux is open-source. If someone wants to go through the labor-of-love to port Linux to SPARC then there's nothing "hidden".

Sun sells x86-based machines that run Linux and I think they'll even sell you a Linux distro to go with the box (of course you don't need to get from them... any distro will do.)

I fail to see the conspiracy angle

sun4m and other "they don't exist, don't ask"'s

[sethstorm]

You are right - some of their older hardware that still is quite usable except for them cutting out support at inopportune times. They've kept 8bit cg* framebuffers yet dropped 24bit ZX's from existence. They kept [very limited] sbus in Opensolaris, yet have made a conscious effort to erase Sparcstations from ever existing in the code.

Should you run into a SunPC or similar, that will bite doubly for being Solaris only (and for versions that may not be in circulation).

Now if you run into something on the ord

Re:

[LingNoi]

I am saying that from what I have been reading that people are complaining about them [Sun] not releasing information they [open source programmers] need to get their hardware working in Linux.

Re:When is Open Source actually news?

[QuantumG]

Dude. There's people who have made derivative works mentioned in the summary. You can't even be bothered reading the summary before posting? Wow.

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:

[ChrisA90278]

don't understand you need a fab to do anything with this,

Not quite.... One can burn this into an FPGA. I don't know how fast it would run but if the goal is to study and experiment with processor design then an FPGA is the tool. The purpose ere is to allow people to study and modify the CPU

Wikipeadia of course has some info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[pimpimpim]

I do wonder how Sun is going to make money the next century. They're trying new stuff, like opening up all their sources (java, solaris), but the money doesn't seem to be flowing back from these actions yet. Don't get me wrong, I think this might end up being really good for them selling the CPU in other devices, but I also think Sun makes pretty good products, and one of the last alternatives to the X86s, (for a huge price) and it would be sad if they went down.

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:

[TheRaven64]

I don't work at Sun, but it's pretty clear that their business model has only changed very slightly. What they have always sold is vertical integration; you buy the hardware, software, and support from Sun and they guarantee that the hardware and software work well together, and the support includes people who can fix either if they don't.

The difference is that they are now marketing a lack of lock-in as a value-added service. Previously, migrating away from Sun was hard because you had to port your co

Re:21st century business plan

[jcnnghm]

Hardware. I transitioned all of my company's servers to Sun (when they started selling x86 servers) over the last few years, and I couldn't be happier. The equipment is more expensive, but it is also of a superior quality and features real enterprise management features. Opening up Solaris had a lot to do with my initial decision, and I wouldn't be surprised if we don't transition to the T2 in the future. Since all of our servers are virtualized anyway, it isn't really a bad idea to move lots of small servers to a few big servers, and this open architecture will undoubtedly give some experts the opportunity to publish very in depth analysis of the chips.

Too bad there isn't a cheap way to get a Niagra

[OrangeTide]

MIPS is a terrible design. It's no fun to program for it.

I think DLX and Microblaze is a more elegant low-end implementation of a MIPS-like. And I think SPARC and PowerPC are much more practical and useful high-end RISCs.

I would like to see Sun put together a cheap developer's kit, they could market a Mac Mini type form factor as a J2EE developer workstation or something. But the rest of us could pick one up too to see what sorts of cool projects can be done with it. I'm fine with 4-core or 8-core version o

Re:

[downix]

Well, that "too complex" windowing capability is one of the reasons why the Niagra core can run 4 threads simultaneously. It has 4 windows, and swaps them automatically, enabling a deeper pipeline without breaking the ISA. So, the compiler sees ALU's rather than 1.

In addition, I rolled my own 32-bit SPARC once with only 2 register windows, with the compiler did not control. What you had was a "program" window and an "interrupt" window. So when interrupts happened, rather than having to save the register

Re:

[wik]

At least in T1, there are 8 windows for each strand (thread), so 32 windows total. The register file design supports fast window switches within a strand (3 cycles) and can switch between strands on every cycle. The megacell guide included with the RTL has a detailed description of how this really works.

The T1 pipeline is just 6 stages (not terribly deep), while the T2 just adds a bypass stage.

Re:

[mako1138]

Well, I'm trying to synthesize a single core. ISE gets really sluggish when the file count gets large, so I'm doing it on the command line. So far I'm having to fix stuff like

ERROR:Xst - "/..\opensparc\design\sys\iop\spc\dec\rtl\dec_del_ctl.v" line 1102:
Module <dec_del_ctl_spare_ctl_macro__flops_0__num_6> has no port.

which points to something like

dec_del_ctl_spare_ctl_macro__flops_0__num_6 spares (
);

Perhaps there's a way to ignore these, but I don't know XST well enough.

Sun uses Synopsys for the

Re:

[mako1138]

Haha, after 45 minutes of working, XST says:

Mapping all equations...
ERROR:Portability:3 - This Xilinx application has run out of memory or has encou
ntered a memory conflict. Current memory usage is 2090592 kb. Memory problems
may require a simple increase in available system memory, or possibly a fix to t
he software or a special workaround. To troubleshoot or remedy the problem, fir
st: Try increasing your system's RAM. Alternatively, you may try increasing yo
ur system's virtual memory or swap space. If this

Re:

[wik]

The statistics the T1 are available here:

http://fpga.sunsource.net/ [sunsource.net]

The most recent release of the T1 code has a few options for removing functionality (dropping to 1 core and 1 thread) such that it will fit on some of the larger available FPGAs.