OpenSPARC and Power.org, Who has it Right?

Andy Updegrove writes "Last summer, IBM set up Power.org, to promote its PowerPC chip as what it called 'open hardware.' This year, Sun launched the OpenSPARC.net open source project around the source code for its Niagara microprocessor. But what does 'open' mean in the context of hardware? In the case of Power.org, Juan-Antonio Carballo said, 'It includes but is not limited to open source, where specifications or source code are freely available and can be modified by a community of users. It could also mean that the hardware details can be viewed, but not modified. And it does not necessarily mean that open hardware, or designs that contain it, are free of charge.' True to that statement, you have to pay to participate meaningfully in Power.org, as well as pay royalties to implement - it's built on a traditional RAND consortium model. To use the Sun code, though, its just download the code under an open source license, and you're good to go to use anything except the SPARC name. All of which leads to the questions: What does 'open' mean in hardware, and which approach will work?"

Comments

Well...

[nweaver]

Open source cores for full processors are actually old news.

The LEON 2 SPARC-compatible core has been around for years.

Anyone doing a real chip design, however, can afford to pay for a real supported core.

Who has it right?

[ihatewinXP]

I do.

its .org - not ,org

This is the first sentence of the post -c'mon don't make it so easy - I swear I am not a spelling nazi.

Re:Apples/Oranges

[georgewilliamherbert]

Sun does not produce chips. Their business is to define a standard and have others implement the standard, which Sun then uses in their systems.

No, Sun has always designed the majority of the CPUs that they use in their systems. They are fabless; they don't own the chip fabrication factories... but they have buildings full of people working on chip design.

Others have designed SPARC CPU chips (Fujitsu / HAL; Ross) which Sun used, as well. But Sun engineers designed UltraSPARC-I, II, IIi, IIe, III, IIIi, IV, T-1, and going backwards the SuperSPARC, MicroSPARC-I and II, most of the Sun-4 and Sun-4c generation stuff.

Re:Right/Practical

[georgewilliamherbert]

I'm a bit out of it on the latest design requirements for CPUs - is the technology of these folks actually good enough to make a reasonably modern CPU?

Yes. I believe that the best MOSIS process is the IBM 90 nm process, which is 7 metal layer, pretty flexible. The T-1 SPARC we're talking about (Niagra) is a 90 nm, 9 metal layer Copper wire fab design (see Sun's Specs). You can't quite fab a T-1 as Sun laid it out with IBM's process, but it's pretty close. You could produce a roughly the same size, slightly larger and/or slower version of the same chip with a new detail layout, using the same chip level "circuit diagram" but a different physical design with fewer layers of metal used etc. AMD uses 0.13 and 0.09 u (90 nm) processes for their current Opteron line, though theirs are Silicon on Insulator fab processes. Again, different design details, but the same general scale and capabilities. The newest Intel Zeon MP processors are at 65 nm processes, one step past the IBM 90 nm process (components on the average taking roughly half the surface area per step). But Intel still produces a lot of slightly older 90 nm and larger CPUs, and industry consensus is that the 90 nm AMD and 65 nm Intel chips are still roughly at equal performance.

Re:"show me the code"

[iggymanz]

well, I wish sun would give UltraSparc 3 and 4 docs to the open source OS too, but to say they've contributed very little to open source just isn't true. they've made huge contributions like opensolaris & staroffice (you might not like their licenses but that's another issue)

How's about this, then...

[Millennium]

Would this work? At $500US, it comes in well below your price range.