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Sun Niagara 2 CPU Now Open Source
downix writes "Late last night Sun Microsystems announced the immediate availability of the UltraSPARC T2, also known as the Niagara 2 CPU. While we all might not have a silicon fab in the basement, the access to this source code reaffirms Sun's commitment to open source, and in addition gives us FPGA-lovers something new to play with. The source code can be downloaded (with registration) from OpenSPARC.net. Already the previously open sourced T1 has spawned spin-off projects, such as the Simple RISC S1."
The RTL code (Verilog) is GPLed:
http://www.opensparc.net/faqs/licensing/
Other people have built and are shipping product with the prior T1 version, the SimpleRISC folks:
http://www.srisc.com/?s1
The licensing pretty much says "Here, have it, have fun!"
See the sibling post below parent . . . this figure is way low for modern processors. There's a reason that there aren't many upstart processor manufacturers. The fabs are expensive and require significant expertise to work out all the fiddly problems that tend to crop up when dealing with a 65 nm process.
Take, for example, the recent $2.5 Billion Intel plant in China.
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It's basically a multi-core barrel processor - it switches threads on every cycle (similar to the old Cray and CDC gear). This gives it time to fetch data while other threads are being serviced to reduce the likelihood of cache misses. This makes it ideal for highly parallel workloads, like web application servers and multi-user database servers. But the workload needs to be highly parallel for it to perform: a quad core Niagara needs at least sixteen threads to be fully utilised. It has weak floating point, too, since web application and database workloads don't usually depend heavily on this. It's pretty much useless for a typical desktop or workstation workload.
Disclosure: I work for Sun in their software division. This is not secret information, but Sun plans on making money in the next century by selling hardware. Lots and lots of hardware. Why buy it from Sun when you can get it cheaper from elsewhere? That's the other part of Sun's super secret master plan: support contracts. Business do tend to buy from Sun if they have already done so. Maybe it's just easier, maybe it makes the original decision to buy from Sun look better, I don't know. But Sun still sells $billions in hardware each year. The software revenues are a whole lot less.
Yeah, it's there.
http://www.opensparc.net/opensparc-t2/downloads.html
Be warned, the 233MB file decompresses to about 1.5 GB.
The Microprocessor's instruction set has been open for decades. It's all the hardware around the SPARC processor that OpenBSD had trouble getting info on. Sun used to make a huge number of hardware devices for which they provided no documentation on the internals. Of course, these days, most of it is pretty standard. But back then, hearing words like "SBUS" used to make people shudder.
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