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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?"
Who has it right?
I hate that question because it assumes that One is Right and the other is wrong.
It is like asking a student what is the Square root of 9
One student says 2 and the other says 5. Well there is no consensious so one of them has to be correct right? No both are wrong.
In an other class that asks the same question
One student says -3 and the other says 3. So one of them has to be wrong they are different answers. No both answers are correct.
Just because they are multiple view points it doesn't mean that there has to be a write or wrong answer for one of them.
Open your mind people!
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I do.
.org - not ,org
its
This is the first sentence of the post -c'mon don't make it so easy - I swear I am not a spelling nazi.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
All of which leads to the questions: What does 'open' mean in hardware, and which approach will work?
I think you're confused. "Open" has traditionally been shorthand for "Open Standards". Thus your hear terms like "OpenWindows", "OpenLook", and "Open Group". They're all referring to the standards being available to all, and not any sort of Open Source Software take on those standards. Open Standards make the world spin 'round, and are a key reason why we have so much compatibility in our daily lives.
What you're thinking of is "Open Source", also known as "Free (as in freedom and game show prizes) Software". This is a very different category of of openess that relies on a developer to give up some of his rights to support the greater good. This is a laudable goal, but it is often not shared by coorporations and businessmen.
For what its worth, Wikipedia has a fairly good article on the concept of Open Standards.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
In my dream for America I would like to put control of computer hardware and software companies firmly in control of the government - exactly where it should be. At the moment terrorists have way too much access to the inner workings of computers and software - especially with regard to open source software.
Just imagine what could happen if terrorists used the freely and openly available source code in Linux for example to create some sort of super weapon. The results could be catastrophic.
I am pushing like crazy for the US government to take full control of all USA based computer hardware and software companies, effectively creating one large mother company. There would be no more OS wars as there would only be one. Consumers would have the benefit of knowing that their hardware and software was US GOVERNMENT APPROVED (TM) and terrorism free.
To take it perhaps one step further, the government could even enable monitoring devices within the equipment to further prevent any crime or terrorist attacks.
As the old saying goes: IF YOU HAVN'T DONE ANYTHING WRONG YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.
OK, obviously by the definitions most of the Slashdot crowd will go along with, the Sun release is the "open" one.
The more interesting question is "what use is an open core?"
Open source software has obvious utility in that it can be used by millions of people for a wide variety of jobs. All you need is a computer to get started.
Open hardware, on the other hand, is useful only for education or simulations unless you happen to have a fab plant.
If education and experimentation can be served by a "non-free" license then is there really any benefit to having a "free" license? I suspect by the time off the shelf technology is available to create CPUs based on current designs, they will be centuries obsolete. Even US copyrights and patents will have expired by then (unless they change the laws again) so it's a bit of a moot point.
Now I grant this might be a bit of a narrow viewpoint - for example some of the Lisp hardware designs would be very interesting to work with - but since the hardware costs of this sort of manufacture make the information needed to do it only one component of the (EXCEEDINGLY expensive) whole, I'm not sure the marginal benefit of having "free" cores will be very interesting, at least for something like a modern CPU.
Of course, there are non-economic considerations, but I don't really see overwhelming benefits for the "free as in freedom" model as opposed to the "free except for producing your commercial product based on them" model.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
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.
- "Nigeria" is an African country. A prince there will soon be making me very rich.
- "Viagra" is a sex drug. I ordered some from a nice company that emailed me. It will also be here soon.
- Sun's chip is called "Niagara"
"Niagera" is none of these things.
I guess I don't get why IBM would have a problem with other people using their hardware specs for free. The barriers to entry are pretty big for one thing. It's not like your average Joe has a Billion dollar fab in his back yard and can use IBM's code to create a processor. The real trade secrets are in the manufacturing process. There's a big difference in making a chip and making millions of chips that cost less than $100 to mass produce.
No Sigs!
Then there was the i craze. iPod,iMac,ivillage.com, BMW's iDrive, ....
Maybe "open" is the new cool prefix to use. I'm sure anyday now someone will be selling OpenPods, sending openMail...
The phrase 'Open" means nothing. It implies many things, ranging from whether you're RMS to Steve Jobs. Developer programs have been mutating for years, starting way back in the '80s. The real depth of the programs, and their usefulness is pretty simple. Take an example: Intersil releases their specs for their chipsets for WiFi. These chipsets have more WiFi code in BSD and LinuxLand than any other, bar none. Proxim/Lucent/Terabeam/others have huge and cool software basis in the open source world. By contrast, others that mandate you swear fealty and pay staggering amounts of money for code, pragmas, instruction sets, timing info, and so on, get left in the dust.
If you RTFA, you'll find quite a contrasting amount of difference between two top vendors. But read the licenses carefully. Then, where lucky, look up code that others have done before starting to conjure up apps, drivers, and so on. This is the beauty of being open: code, reuse code, share code, improve code, make closed source knotheads look like the idiots they are.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I don't honestly see what making SPARC or PowerPC "open" is going to achieve at this point.
SPARC and PowerPC are pretty clearly niche and/or legacy architectures now. IBM has ceded the mainstream desktop to x86, and SPARC lost that battle a long time ago. The only question most people care about now is whether their x86 system is 32 or 64 bit, Intel or VIA or AMD.
Right now, most open source software tends to be tested and hacked on to at least make it run on PowerPC, for the benefit of Mac users. As the PowerPC Mac users switch to x86, who's going to care about PowerPC compatibility? I remember what it was like running Linux on PowerPC before OS X, and it wasn't pleasant--lots of stuff x86 Linux users took for granted didn't work, or you were stuck with old versions, because nobody had bothered to port, test or debug it.
SPARC and PowerPC will continue in the high-end server niche, but I think that niche is increasingly going to be squeezed by x86 too. Why deal with the possible risk of having your enterprise application break on PowerPC Linux, or being stuck with old versions of software, when you could run it on a big x86 Linux system and run the same binary 90%+ of the app's users are relying on every day? Sometimes there's safety in numbers.
PowerPC has the embedded space, of course, and maybe that'll be enough to sustain it as a target for general purpose code. I guess video game toolkits and related libraries will continue to be ported to PowerPC, at least.
But to go back to "openness"--in the embedded and video games space, who cares if the design is "open" or not? All the PowerPC video game consoles are locked down proprietary systems, as are various other embedded PowerPC systems like TiVo and car computers. And in the high end server space, I don't know that anyone cares there either--System i and System z seem to do OK without having open standard CPUs.
[Opinions mine, definitely not IBM's, obviously... and I may be completely wrong, perhaps openness is important in those niches?]
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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)
SPARC and PowerPC are pretty clearly niche and/or legacy architectures now. IBM has ceded the mainstream desktop to x86, and SPARC lost that battle a long time ago. The only question most people care about now is whether their x86 system is 32 or 64 bit, Intel or VIA or AMD.
Unless we're talking about the 100x or so more machines in the embedded space. Just because the chip isn't in a PeeCee doesn't mean it's not a computer. And embedded designers DO care about this stuff.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
I remember reading ~1992 that anyone doing real software development could afford to pay for a real supported compiler. They were downplaying the benefit of GCC and the other GNU tools. Well as hardware has gotten cheaper and faster and the Internet has expanded and more people have gotten tech-savvy, guess what? Lots of people are doing *REAL* software development with FLOSS software tools.
Back when you needed $10000 worth of hardware + OS licenses etc. to make software development feasible, paying $300 for a compiler was no biggie. But now you can get an awesome complete workstation for $600 and even the $100 Microsoft OS tax starts to seem like a pretty crappy deal.
I imagine that hardware design will increasingly go the same way. Obviously, there are a lot more hurdles to go before we'll be fabbing chips in our basements. But I work in electronics research in a physics department, and people are doing amazing stuff like printing integrated circuits with inkjet printers... commercial equipment to do that is now selling for $100k.
My bicyles
Would this work? At $500US, it comes in well below your price range.
Sure, everybody just wants a nice cheap powerful x86 box these days, even Mac users. But there'd be a lot of hacker appeal to having the source for the processors available. Everybody would tinker with their processors and implement them on FPGA (a cheap way of fabbing chips on a small scale, basically). Instead of people boasting about their tuned kernel, we'd be boasting about our tuned processors. "I got my OpenSPARC running on a Xilinx FPGA and I optimized out the floating point unit so I could add more cache."
And as we've seen with Linux, W3, Apache, etc., hacker projects can turn into BIG business down the road!!
Frankly, I'd switch over to OpenSPARC or OpenPOWER or OpenRISC if I could. I already can and do hack around with the source code to my software, and I'd love to be able to do the same with the hardware...
My bicyles
I work for a Power.org member, so maybe I am biased, but I think OpenSPARC is one of the best things Sun has ever done.
But it's no way as cool as the Solaris port to PowerPC.
Sun is involved in both, you see!
So who cares? They're both right.