Slashdot Mirror
Sun Open-Sourcing UltraSPARC Design
AKAImBatman writes "While everyone was busy with the holiday season, Sun Microsystems quietly announced the start of the OpenSPARC project. Unlike previous CPUs that were based on the "Open" SPARC specifications (such as LEON), Sun is releasing the complete Verilog source code to their latest and greatest microprocessor. Their current time frame for releasing the source code to the public is in March of 2006. Given their success with the OpenSolaris project, it seems that this is likely to be more than just vaporware. So get out your Virtex FPGAs and your Verilog compilers, and let's get ready to hack some hardware!"
Go to http://www.opencores.org/ for more examples of Open Hardware.
Pardon my threadjack, but I just realized that the editors secretly switched my link for a competing brand. Unlike Folgers, I'm afraid it's much cooler to get processor news straight from the horse's mouth.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Perhaps you should start comparing prices, then:
So, it would appear that Sun's support prices are actually lower rather than beating Red Hat's. In fact, for one of Sun's cheapest server systems, you can get Platinum support for $2304 for three years. Platinum support includes both 24/7 software support and 24/7 two-hour response time on-site hardware support. That's cheaper then one year of Red Hat's software-only 24/7 support.
Again, compare prices:
So, the Sun server may not be as cheap as building a system out of spare parts lying around in your basement, but it really is pretty cheap compared to the competition in that space.
Try fitting a P4 or UltraSPARC in a Virtex4-1xxLX, you are going to run into several problems.
1) The ASIC runs at 1GHz+ frequency, the V4 implementation would run around 300MHz at best and cost over $10k for the FPGA alone.
2) Most FPGAs block-RAM and LUT-based RAM can be dual-ported at most, this is problematic for register files where a dozen registers may be concurrently accessed during any given cycle. This would require either register duplication or time-multiplexed register access and a corresponding down-clocking of everything else.
3) Logic is expended pretty fast if you do stuff like 64x64 multipliers using logic only. Sure, there are dedicated multipliers in most modern low-cost FPGAs but these are hard-wired to handle DSP-centric MAC operations.
4) People are upset with desktop CPU's power usage but building similar CPUs on FPGAs would require many times more power to achieve the same performance since FPGA's switch fabric and general-purpose programmable elements have way more parasitic capacitance than ASICs' internal hard-wired traces and circuits. With ASIC, 1M logic gates is only ~6M transistors but a ~1M gate-equivalent FPGA with switch fabric and configuration bits goes beyond 50M transistors with much longer routing delays.
FPGAs are not particularly suitable for general-purpose processing where the system has extensive subsystem interdependencies and shared elements. Where they can truly shine is in applications where the data flow is mostly regular and where processing can be broken down into well-defined self-contained stages like telecom, crypto and DSP. Another area where FPGAs can shine is hard-realtime where they can have dedicated logic to handle time-critical events with 100% deterministic deadlines, unlike modern CPUs and OSes where realtime applications have to put up with unpredictable branch mispredicts, cache misses, preemption, out-of-order execution, etc.
That said, the UltraSPARC's verilog source should make for really interesting reading for logic and digital system engineers and academics like myself. This move makes a lot of sense: CPU designers need to hire new talent and this new talent needs to learn about common practice in real-world designs to be of any use or they'll spend most of their first months just catching up. With a real-world design in the wild, CPU-designer job postings could ask people to specify which architectural components they would like to improve and the interviews could steer towards presenting those improvements instead of often irrelevant technicalities.
OpenSolaris has an OSI license. It is called the CDDL. Welcome to open source.
Sun offers the Sun ONE Studio tools for free. Vastly superior to GCC in every measurable way. Of course that is my opinion based on years of code crunching. The fact is that these are available for free. Download and go.
I believe that the source is being made open also.
Absolutely. All of the components under the CDDL are open. Have fun.
More on the way.
Heck, Sun just spent FIVE years working on an entirely new filesystem called ZFS and they released it and open sourced it at the same time. How cool is that?
See : http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-11/sunf lash.20051130.1.html
I have heard that .. somewhere. I think Sun does that too. So does my corner store.
see : http://www.redhat.com/sundown/ .. I bought one because it was five times cheaper than my daily coffee intake and I can't live with that either.
Why is there an IBM logo on that page? Why is there an edition RHEL for POWER but not for Sparc ? Why does it say in big BOLD graphics there "Migrate to Linux with IBM + Red Hat"?
Now go look at : http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/compare/serve r/
The absolute cheapest edition is $349 and the top is $2499 !!
I can get Solaris for FREE.
For UltraSparc or for Intel or AMD Opteron.
The cost of an OPTIONAL software support contract is less than 34 cents a day.
I ought to know
See my blog : http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=107
While you're surfing, look at the three guys at :
http://www.novell.com/linux/unixtolinux/
They are all parked on a bench outside the IT Directors office waiting to tell how reiserfs screwed up their data again and they lost the corporate database because of some messed up kernel patch.
But that is just me guessing.
Sure. I agree with "cheap".
Show me a 64-bit Opteron that is faster, cooler and less costly than a SunFire X2100.
Really. Anyone can make junk that is cheap and monsters that are massively expensive.
Show me a 64-bit machine that has more horsepower than an 8-core 1.2GHz SunFire T1000 or a 64-bit AMD Opteron machine with more horsepower than the SunFire X2100.
For less money.
Oh, and the Opteron gear has to be certified to run Windows as well as Linux as well as a real UNIX.
Good luck.
Take a long hard stare at my blog from a little while ago :
http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=113
I count, what? 16 e