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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. so... by master_meio · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    you guys like lunix? lol.

    you guys like to talk about computers? you guys like talk about lunix?

  2. Sun, I know what you're trying to say it... by sethstorm · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    ...but this does not make for an excuse to keep sun4m off OpenSolaris, no matter what mutterings your kernel devs might have to justify it. Now if you made it possible
    to rig up an ultrasparc over mbus somehow with this, you might get somewhere. However, that still does not justify including sbus, but cutting out the architecture that primarily used it from source code (even if it was an early build).
    At the very least, it'd be a fitting end to see a source/binary (for drivers if impossible to source) release of OpenSolaris fit to sun4m. That would get people still with Quad Ross SS/20's, Ross SS10's, SS5/170's, and the others out there that definitely could take advantage of some of the features as well as have the ability to fix some of the major offenders (since I guess Bart Smaalders seems to have forgotten about the numerous bugs, and just wants to shove sun4m under the "closed hierarchy" carpet).

    It's not about the cost, it's about having the ability to fix the bugs on these machines. Distraction with an open Ultrasparc core isnt a good idea.

    The best I can see out of it is Sun trying to follow in the paths of OpenPOWER. At least the company behind OpenPOWER is the same one that at least did one last release (AIX 5L 5.1) that allowed some sort of openness that Sun would drop at the fall of a hat.

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