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Sun Open-Sourcing UltraSPARC Design

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the why-shouldn't-it-work-for-hardware-too dept.

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!"

2 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. The roadmap is clear by d41d8cd98f00b204e980 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Sun has a comprehensive roadmap for UltraSPARC going forward and combining forces with Fujutsu on SPARC64.

    These new servers absolutely rock, and at superb prices.

    I once had the pleasure of a 4-way Opteron v40z with a development version of 64-bit Solaris 10. It was a screamer, especially compared to our 4-way Dell P4 Xeon box, and 64-bit.

    It was plenty fast enough to host 4 zones and several developers working on KDE, gcc and all manner of other stuff.

    At last, Sun looks like it's turning the corner (despite the best efforts of some of its PHBs - no names mentioned).

    Good luck Sun.

  2. Re:too far? by blastwave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Personally I enjoy watching Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Dell and IBM all squirm as Sun undercuts their prices in every product line. I can get Solaris for free, Sun Cluster for free, the tools for free, Java for free, the source code to Solaris for free and a dual core Opteron or multi-core UltraSparc for dirt cheap. The FUD being sprayed by Red Hat/IBM and Novell is just staggering.

    Dennis Clarke
    http://www.blastwave.org/