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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.
Finally a chip that you can run Java on.
That's what I got the first time I tried loading this article on /.
But seriously, what's the real point? Are the means to actually make one of these processors beyond 99% of companies and pretty much 99.99% of the people on the planet? What about the patenting of the process or equipment to actually make the processor?
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Clicking the OpenSPARC.net link returned the message: "This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota"
...when you are talking about a market with massive investment related non-recoverable expenses & high barriers to entry, such as processor fabrication.
Although I submit it would be really cool to just manufacture these things in my garage.
Go look at the CPU cycles per watt that the UltraSPARC T1 delivers.
Now, figure the UltraSPARC T2 is better than that.
I can't wait for somebody to design a new generation of desktop PCs that have lower power consumption than that of previous generations but without sacrificing performance and graphics. Anybody know how much power typical UltraSPARC based desktop PCs consume compared to Intel or AMD based desktop PCs?
Nothing that it matter... just interested, but does anybody know if it is released under GNU GPL 2 or 3?
Many FPGA houses provide free ARM cores etc for inclusion on their FPGAs. You can build an ARM-based (or other core based) device using free download tools and run it on an FPGA that costs a few bucks. To do this the licensee need to pay a heft licencing fee to ARm or whomever. Now they can also distribute GPL cores.
But is this really useful? To use a GPL core would mean that all the rest of the chip design would have to be released too. Very few hardware builders will be prepared to release their silicon source code because that is often the only way they have of preventing mass knock-offs etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Apparently Sun will sell the chips to you already manufactured if you want.
I always wanted a Tech 2 processor.
Oh wait...
Depending upon how the patents (are there patents?) are handled. China has been researching it's own chip design in the past. This could be a huge push for Sun if China abandoned trying to re-invent the wheel and just started cranking out UltraSPARC's.
Not to mention Windows not running on such, but Linux will.
And China would have a home source of chips for their IT industry and would not have to import Intel or AMD.
How many cores does this chip have?
8 cores, 8 threads each.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
One would be to build a simulator that is accurate at the level of silicon, so that you can cross-compile and run binaries for this CPU on a non-native architecture. Another would be to look at some specific module within the core and re-use the code within an OpenCores project. A third would be to reverse this - take OpenCores code (or write your own) and generate a module that would work within the T2 and would provide functionality the developers might want. A fourth would be to produce a specialized version of the chip (rad-hardened, for example) without paying license costs. And so on.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nothing that it matter... [is it] GNU GPL 2 or 3?
It actually matters a lot because Sun probably owns a lot of patents.
Too true.
If I've got this right: Under GPL3 anybody with foundry access could make the chip or a derivative, with no more patent issues than Sun itself would have. But under GPL2 they might have to enter separate license agreements to actually implement it.
= = = =
Presuming this release does make the chip open to anybody absent further licensing, it will be interesting to see how it affects Sun's future.
On one hand it means any company that wants to could build the chip and sell it in competition with Sun (which has borne the development costs on the SPARC series - but recouped much of them already).
On the other hand, they have a number of advantages: Already up and fabbing, deep understanding of the chip, etc.
Further, one big source of resistance to adoption of their chips is the concern for what happens if Sun abandons the line, stops developing it, goes belly-up, or closes up again. With a perpetual license to others to build this chip and make improvements on it, that's no longer an issue. Even if Sun went belly-up and left them with no other sources, a big enough company with a product based on this chip could even commission the fabrication of its own chips, rather than twisting in the wind for lack of supplies. So such a company can design this chip into their product line and buy it from Sun without betting their own company on a possibly weak supplier.
Let's see Intel or AMD compete with that that. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I am actually hoping that AMD or Intel decide that there is useful technology they can use in their own chips.
Especially AMD who needs whatever they can get at the moment. It is really far fetched, but possible we see AMD respond with a GPL chip that uses parts of Sun's tech they find useful. If they can get ahead of Intel for another generation or two it could be worth it to them.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I work at Sun (documenting x86 systems, as it happens) and I think you're really oversimplifying our business strategy. Just because we're doing x86 doesn't mean we're abandoning SPARC. Indeed, I see a lot of work going on with SPARC-based products. You might consider this a bad idea. (For obvious reasons, I can't possibly comment.) But it's the current business plan, and as long as that's the case, SPARC is not abandonware.
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?
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
That comparison is between a 1.0 GHz UltraSPARC T1 - a three-year-old chip. There are 1.4 GHz chips currently available. How many months has the Intel Q6600 been on the market?
How well will that Intel architecture scale to over 4 CPUs, anyway. At least AMD can do that.
1.4 GHz * 8 cores * 8 threads = 89.6 fake GHz.
I wonder how many BogoMIPS that is equivalent to.
Except the Arm7 core will cost you more then 10 bucks in license fees, unlike opensparc.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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)!
- mritunjai
T2000 huh. The last time I played with one of those, I had to freaking melt it.
-John Connor
'We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week'
I bet its the only chip they've shipped this week.
The hurdles are not technology, but political. Sure people want free-as-in-beer cores, but they don't want GPL cores that force them to release their design. Just go look at the technical specs of the thing:
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-08/sunflash.2
With specs like that, the OpenSparc T1 processor will not fit in any FPGA in existance right now, or in the next few years.
So the hurdle is indeed technical.
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
Yes. You, the end user, can modify the processor to the extent that is possible for the technology involved. Since a processor is physical hardware, that means the "compilation" phase for modification involves a microprocessor fab. If you don't have one, that sucks - but it's not something that's possible to fix.
Even Richard Stallman, and even the GPLv3, wouldn't complain about you not owning a fab (and therefore not being able to use a modified UltraSparc T2 in practice) as a freedom issue. This isn't like Tivoization, because Sun can't patch your physical hardware either.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The posters here seem to be complaining that this is worthless because individuals can't make their own processor chips.
That's not the point. Here's the point:
1: Sun's processors are a niche market. People don't use them because they're harder to use than cheap commodity processors from Intel. Why are they harder to use? Because not enough people use them to create the kind of economic ecosystem that drives down the price of using the processors.
2: All over Asia are chip factories that make low-end embedded devices, RAM chips, and so on. Factories that are owned by companies that don't have the cash on hand to do the R&D to design their own processors to compete with Intel.
3: By GPL'ing their chip designs, Sun lets all those Asian factories produce chips that perform like Intels but cost even less. This gives people an extra incentive to switch away from Intel and to create the very economic ecosystem the processor needs.
4. Next, Sun releases enhanced versions of the chip that aren't GPL'ed. Chip consumers can now choose from fast commodity processors or more expensive deluxe models - that are still code compatible.
And Sun can repeat steps #3 and #4 as often as they like, feeding their previous generation designs to the GPL audience as their newest designs hit the market.
Clear, Dark Skies
what's the hardware meaning of a thread?
As another poster has pointed out: You build a core with multiple copies of the register set and replicate (or take turns on) the associated instruction-dispatching logic.
But these multiple CPUs share a common set of arithmetic/logic execution units, along with arbitration logic. Different threads will be doing different things at any given instant, and thus using different sections of the ALU.
The arbitration logic decides which thread gets which hunk of ALU at any given moment. And some threads will be stalled waiting for data and won't need any ALU function at all. Of course when more threads want a particular kind of execution unit than are available, one or more of them must stall. But by having the right number of copies of the commonly-used types of execution units you can keep a number of threads running at or near full speed most of the time and the ALU components mostly busy, with much less silicon than if each thread had a full-blown CPU and most of the ALU logic was idle at any given moment. With less silicon logic you can put things closer together and speed it up still more.
This approach has been around since Cray was at Control Data.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hmm... that makes me want a dual-CPU system with one T1 and one Cell. Imagine if they were both Hypertransport-compatible...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What is the business outcome and advantage for Sun with this open hardware move?
It looks to me like Sun has figured out that they are in a knowledge business. They are operating on an information theory algorithm. They are creating a much larger pyramid of customers for their particular computer knowledge. There is a new enormous bottom layer of people contemplating using this fascinating powerful chunk of information. They are emitting information, not hardware.
The thing from information theory is: The more high quality information a source emits, the more valuable the source becomes. Sun still has the stable of PhD researchers from U.C. Berkeley and some more wags from Stanford. So the company will continue in the business of emitting information.
If you want the Macintosh of mainframes, they will sell them to you. If you want to boot Solaris or wire up Sparc chips you are still their customer. Sun will be your first publisher, web site and consultant.
It seems to me that this is a business innovation. It has been 60 years since Shannon's information theory paper suggested that the source that emits information increases in entropy. Sun is doing that by making available a uniquely sophisticated design - not hiding it in file cabinets in the basement.