Brew your own SPARC: SPARC IP Core SCSLed

Tekmage writes "Sun has just announced the release of it's SPARC IP core under their Community Source License. " The dialogue over whether or not the SCSL is a good license continues, but it's better nothing, IMHO. Interesting move on their part, especially given IBM's recent moves with the PowerPC designs.

Comments

It's much better than nothing!

[brad.hill]

For years, one of the biggest arguments from the hacker community against the harsh prosecution of people like Kevin Mitnick has been the idea that looking at source code doesn't harm a company. The argument is thus: "If you're not using it to compete against them, they suffer no harm; it was just curiosity and a desire to learn."

Finally a company, Sun, is doing exactly what hackers have been demanding all these years: letting them have a look at interesting technology, to learn from and satisfy their curiosity.

This isn't about open source evangelism and your imagined right to free computer hardware. It's about giving students and other interested people a tool to learn from, in a way that doesn't hurt Sun's business.

Nobody loses anything from this. People interested in microprocessor design gain. Why are you complaining?

If you expect Sun to license people to compete against it with it's own technology, you're living in a dream world. It's not going to hurt the GPL to have more information available in the world, and with your hypothetical binary choice between GPL and total secrecy, most companies would choose total secrecy. Be glad some have chosen to imagine a third alternative that *is* much better than nothing.

Richard Stallman on "Free Hardware"

[Skeezix]

Here is a link to an article by Richard Stallman that I'm sure a lot of you have read. It talks about "free hardware designs and why he sees no social imperative for free hardware as he does for free software. I personally agree that there isn't the social imperative for free hardware designs, but at the same time I think free hardware designs would be very beneficial to corporations, students, and the consumer...in fact the consumer would most likely benefit the most since there would be an accelerated rate of development and competition (just as free software breeds this type of acceleration--look no further than the KDE and GNOME camps for an excellent example of this).

--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org

How is this different from their move last March?

[EngrBohn]

They made the announcement back in March. I remember talking to one of my professors about the research & academic opportunities it presented.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /03/02/1133216.shtml
Christopher A. Bohn

Just a little note

[aheitner]

The MicroSPARCII is not a particularly exciting processor. It's the chip that was used in the SS5, and it ran up to 170MHz in the last SS5 offered. It's not designed for SMP (Turbo- and HyperSPARCs did that in SS10 and SS20). It's a 32bit chip, a bit faster at floating point than an equivalent Pentium. (it's also the chip in my SPARCBook 3 :).

So don't expect cheap high powered crazy Suns floating around soon. Sun wants people using MSII's where they're now using R4xxx's and ARMcores and m68k's in PDAs.

An advantage is of course Linux already runs fine on it :) But it does on the ARM, Motorola and MIPS chips too.

Re:Just a little note

[stange]

This is for the MicroSparc IIep, which is an embedded processor; it includes support for the PCI bus, for example.

It wasn't used in the Sparc 5, that was the Microsparc II, with an SBUS controller. The fastest speed of the Microsparc II was 110 Mhz.

The TurboSparc ran at 170 Mhz in the Sparc 5.

The Sparc 10 and Sparc 20 used the SuperSparc and the HyperSparc. The SuperSparc was the first V8 architecture Sparc processor from Sun.

It is expected that Sun will also be releasing the same information for the UltraSparc processors in the near future.

The point that is being lost here is that the IIep is a current product that is used in embedded solutions. Sun want's people to use this chip, and in an effort to increase sales, is releasing this information. For those who are unaware, the embedded cpu market is vastly larger than the PC/Workstation market.