Sun Moves Into Commodity Silicon

Samrobb writes "According to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun has decided to release its UltraSPARC T2 processor under the GPL. Schwartz writes, 'We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week — delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing power on a single chip — running standard Java applications and open source OS's. Simultaneously, we've said we're entering the commodity marketplace, and opening the chip up to our competition... To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2... the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL.'" Sun is still working on getting these released; early materials are up on OpenSPARC.net.

Comments

Re:Sweet

[AKAImBatman]

Finally a chip that you can run Java on.

Because MAJC, picoJava, aJile, and Jazelle don't count, right?

Re:Abandoware open source

[WebMink]

Nobody cared.

Well, apart from Simply RISC, who used the design to build a single-core chip (S1) for embedded applications.

And Polaris Micro in China, who are doing the same.

And David Miller & friends, who made Linux run on it.

And Canonical who support Ubuntu running on it.

And the other Linux distros picking it up.

And... Oh, sorry, you were just trolling, right?

Re:FPGAs

[WebMink]

producing a less-powerful one based on it is very possible

Indeed, someone just did:

Arturo Mann proudly announces that he has successfully synthesized the S1 Core on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA device...

More details on Simply RISC's web site.

Re:Abandoware open source

[afidel]

The T1 is NOT abandonware, in fact I would say it is one of Sun's greatest strengths. We are doing a design for a JD Edwards data warehouse and while our JDE system is on Oracle on Windows we are looking at Unix platforms as strong choices for the data warehouse. Thanks to only needing 6 total boxes for the middleware layers for 4 different environments vs 16 Windows boxes Sun is 10% cheaper and 10% lower in 3 year operating costs despite having power sucking, expensive DB servers.

Re:Did I read this right?

[Wesley Felter]

1.4 GHz * 8 cores * 8 threads = 89.6 fake GHz.

I wonder how many BogoMIPS that is equivalent to.

FAQ on performance of this puppy

[mritunjai]

Just to quell the concerns of "abandonware" and cries of "performance benchmarks"

Linky on numbers

Summary:

* This puppy comes ahead of Power5 and top-dog (till now) Power6
* Highest single CPU integer and floating point performance

Oh, and it has 2 10G network interfaces on chip... and EIGHT crypto cores to keep them running full throttle too. All this with 8 core each with its own floating point unit and 8 threads.

Oh and BTW, Ubuntu guys just booted their distro on this puppy :-)

So yeah, it runs Linux (too)!