Except that Edison wasn't the only or the first person to have the idea. He wasn't even the first one to prototype a working bulb. He was just the first one to make them last long enough to be practical.
It's not cheaper than setting up an ASIC mask and production run? The whole idea of the FPGA is that despite the high cost per unit, if you need only a few units you don't have the huge lead-in cost.
I didn't say "cheap" as a comparison between two different FPGAs. I said "cheap" as in total cost of a few FPGAs compared to getting an ASIC done. Buying a wagyu steak isn't cheap, but if your options for one meal are the wagyu or buying the local McDonald's franchise, it's cheaper to go with the wagyu.
The actual exact implementation of a particular SPARC might not be completely open, but they are all built against an open spec to be called "Sparc". That's a far cry from x86 or POWER.
SPARC International was intended to open the SPARC architecture to make a larger ecosystem for the design, which has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Texas Instruments, Atmel, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu. As a result of SPARC International, the SPARC architecture is fully open and non-proprietary.
In March 2006, the complete design of Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor was released-in open-source form at OpenSPARC.net and named the OpenSPARC T1. In 2007, the design of Sun's UltraSPARC T2 microprocessor was also released in open-source form, as OpenSPARC T2; see OpenSPARC.net. As of June 2009 the SPARC design was used by Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. to create the processor product named Venus SPARC64 VIIIfx which is capable of 128 billion floating point operations per second (128 GFLOPs).
There have been three major revisions of the architecture. The first published revision was the 32-bit SPARC Version 7 (V7) in 1986. SPARC Version 8 (V8), an enhanced SPARC architecture definition, was released in 1990. The main differences between V7 and V8 were the addition of integer multiply and divide instructions, and an upgrade from 80-bit "extended precision" floating-point arithmetic to 128-bit "quad-precision" arithmetic. SPARC V8 served as the basis for IEEE Standard 1754-1994, an IEEE standard for a 32-bit microprocessor architecture. SPARC Version 9, the 64-bit SPARC architecture, was released by SPARC International in 1993. It was developed by the SPARC Architecture Committee consisting of Amdahl Corporation, Fujitsu, ICL, LSI Logic, Matsushita, Phillips, Ross Technology, Sun Microsystems, and Texas Instruments. In 2002, the SPARC Joint Programming Specification 1 (JPS1) was released by Fujitsu and Sun, describing processor functions which were identically implemented in the CPUs of both companies ("Commonality"). The first CPUs conforming to JPS1 were the UltraSPARC III by Sun and the SPARC64 V by Fujitsu. Functionalities which are not covered by JPS1 are documented for each processor in "Implementation Supplements". In early 2006, Sun released an extended architecture specification, UltraSPARC Architecture 2005. This includes not only the non-privileged and most of the privileged portions of SPARC V9, but also all the architectural extensions (such as CMT, hyperprivileged, VIS 1, and VIS 2) present in Sun's UltraSPARC processors starting with the UltraSPARC T1 implementation. UltraSPARC Architecture 2005 includes Sun's standard extensions and remains compliant with the full SPARC V9 Level 1 specification. In 2007, Sun released an updated specification, UltraSPARC Architecture 2007, to which the UltraSPARC T2 implementation complied. The architecture has provided continuous application binary compatibility from the first SPARC V7 implementation in 1987 into the Sun UltraSPARC Architecture implementations. Among various implementations of SPARC, Sun's SuperSPARC and UltraSPARC-I were very popular, and were used as reference systems for SPEC CPU95 and CPU2000 benchmarks. The 296 MHz UltraSPARC-II is the reference system for the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark.
Snippet from SPARC International:
SPARC Architecture License
$99.00 Administration fee Available to anyone, royalty free, gives developers the right to design, manufacture and freely market components conforming to the SPARC Architecture. Contact: sparcinfo@sparc.org for architecture license.
Okay, so $99 for a royalty free license isn't exactly pure open source.
The key word is prototype. Once you have chosen the prototype, you can go to production with it. That's what this project is about. They are trying to find enough people who want this prototype that has been in FPGAs for a long time to go to larger-scale production with a higher speed chip as a result. Keep using FPGAs to figure out the core you want (or to play with as many as you want), but if you decide to put it into a mass-market item, an ASIC is probably the way to go.
Well, as others have said, there can still be indirect harm from the images being traded. These kids are usually still alive, unlike Lizzie Borden. Catching the people doing the direct harm, though, and preventing more of it are more important to me than the recordings.
BTW, yes, I was molested by neighbor when I was little. So anyone who hasn't been really needs to not tell me I don't understand.
"The really big problem is, when something does end up not working it's harder to figure out what's causing it to break and impossible to fix without reinstalling the OS."
My point is that trading it is awful, but preventing further production of it is more important to stop. If the recording doesn't exist, it can't be traded.
If IBM was to open source OS/2, not only would Microsoft be all over them (it was, remember, a joint development effort), but they'd probably be in violation of the agreement with eComStation which allows that company to modify and continue selling the thing.
Don't expect Texas, which is a state, to do anything about the Federal court district in Texas, which is a Federal court run by the Federal government. Do you understand the difference between a state and a federation of states?
A user of American customary units can measure the same person in feet and inches or just inches of height, or in pounds and ounces or just pounds and decimals of pounds, or just in ounces if that's really the desire. We even have scales that work in kilograms, believe it or not.
Hey, as soon as your country fields a pro team according to the same rules, petition to get it included in Major League Baseball.
You may not realize this, but there's a team in Canada (there used to be two). Many of the players come from the Caribbean nations and South America. Some come from Japan (where the game is also popular).
The Little League World Series, which is totally separate from the MLB championship, does include the world by the way. The championship brackets are formed of the eight US regions and the 8 non-US regions formed as to get enough teams to play. Little League World Series. The Us champions play the international champions to determine the world champions.
This isn't because we try to exclude the rest of the world. It's because the rest of the world isn't playing organized baseball as much as the US.
Thanks for attempting to invalidate another person's private experiences and opinions. As a supposed professor of something or other, you should probably know that's impossible.
A foot is 12 inches, not 11.
Why in the world would you need a fence post every foot?
What type of fencing are you using that requires 2/3 to be more accurate than somewhere between 9/16 and 11/16?
If your fencing is that precisely demanding, why not use a caliper with thousandths of an inch?
37.36 cm? 373.6 mm? You place fence posts to within a tenth of a millimeter? Really? Bullshit.
The American way of measuring screws, taps, nuts, and dies isn't Byzantine at all. It's perfectly natural to measure the diameter of the threads, the diameter of the shaft without the threads, the distance between the threads, and the thickness of the threads. What's not very helpful is that we have so many different and non-standard combinations of those. The "screw number" system is a list of standardized sizes. The reason there are 00 and 000 screws rather than -1 and -2 screws is that '-', '.', and similar marks can be difficult to read on old, scratched, dinged, divotted, grimy, oily parts.
I have never owned a car built after 1978 that didn't include kilometers per hour on the speedometer. I have also never had a single problem crossing the border into Canada in an "American" car, many of which are built in Canada anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Osama != Obama
It would have been funny if your skim was accurate, Tweak.
If you consider bin Laden a friend and countryman, you need to die, too.
Except that Edison wasn't the only or the first person to have the idea. He wasn't even the first one to prototype a working bulb. He was just the first one to make them last long enough to be practical.
The fact that there's a program or four in many a page may have something to do with that.
It's not cheaper than setting up an ASIC mask and production run? The whole idea of the FPGA is that despite the high cost per unit, if you need only a few units you don't have the huge lead-in cost.
I didn't say "cheap" as a comparison between two different FPGAs. I said "cheap" as in total cost of a few FPGAs compared to getting an ASIC done. Buying a wagyu steak isn't cheap, but if your options for one meal are the wagyu or buying the local McDonald's franchise, it's cheaper to go with the wagyu.
No, no car analogy, sorry.
Damnit.. didn't mean to hit submit yet...
The actual exact implementation of a particular SPARC might not be completely open, but they are all built against an open spec to be called "Sparc". That's a far cry from x86 or POWER.
Snippets from Wikipedia:
SPARC International was intended to open the SPARC architecture to make a larger ecosystem for the design, which has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Texas Instruments, Atmel, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu. As a result of SPARC International, the SPARC architecture is fully open and non-proprietary.
In March 2006, the complete design of Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor was released-in open-source form at OpenSPARC.net and named the OpenSPARC T1. In 2007, the design of Sun's UltraSPARC T2 microprocessor was also released in open-source form, as OpenSPARC T2; see OpenSPARC.net.
As of June 2009 the SPARC design was used by Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. to create the processor product named Venus SPARC64 VIIIfx which is capable of 128 billion floating point operations per second (128 GFLOPs).
There have been three major revisions of the architecture. The first published revision was the 32-bit SPARC Version 7 (V7) in 1986. SPARC Version 8 (V8), an enhanced SPARC architecture definition, was released in 1990. The main differences between V7 and V8 were the addition of integer multiply and divide instructions, and an upgrade from 80-bit "extended precision" floating-point arithmetic to 128-bit "quad-precision" arithmetic. SPARC V8 served as the basis for IEEE Standard 1754-1994, an IEEE standard for a 32-bit microprocessor architecture.
SPARC Version 9, the 64-bit SPARC architecture, was released by SPARC International in 1993. It was developed by the SPARC Architecture Committee consisting of Amdahl Corporation, Fujitsu, ICL, LSI Logic, Matsushita, Phillips, Ross Technology, Sun Microsystems, and Texas Instruments.
In 2002, the SPARC Joint Programming Specification 1 (JPS1) was released by Fujitsu and Sun, describing processor functions which were identically implemented in the CPUs of both companies ("Commonality"). The first CPUs conforming to JPS1 were the UltraSPARC III by Sun and the SPARC64 V by Fujitsu. Functionalities which are not covered by JPS1 are documented for each processor in "Implementation Supplements".
In early 2006, Sun released an extended architecture specification, UltraSPARC Architecture 2005. This includes not only the non-privileged and most of the privileged portions of SPARC V9, but also all the architectural extensions (such as CMT, hyperprivileged, VIS 1, and VIS 2) present in Sun's UltraSPARC processors starting with the UltraSPARC T1 implementation. UltraSPARC Architecture 2005 includes Sun's standard extensions and remains compliant with the full SPARC V9 Level 1 specification.
In 2007, Sun released an updated specification, UltraSPARC Architecture 2007, to which the UltraSPARC T2 implementation complied.
The architecture has provided continuous application binary compatibility from the first SPARC V7 implementation in 1987 into the Sun UltraSPARC Architecture implementations.
Among various implementations of SPARC, Sun's SuperSPARC and UltraSPARC-I were very popular, and were used as reference systems for SPEC CPU95 and CPU2000 benchmarks. The 296 MHz UltraSPARC-II is the reference system for the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark.
Snippet from SPARC International:
SPARC Architecture License
$99.00 Administration fee
Available to anyone, royalty free, gives developers the right to design, manufacture and freely market components conforming to the SPARC Architecture. Contact: sparcinfo@sparc.org for architecture license.
Okay, so $99 for a royalty free license isn't exactly pure open source.
The key word is prototype. Once you have chosen the prototype, you can go to production with it. That's what this project is about. They are trying to find enough people who want this prototype that has been in FPGAs for a long time to go to larger-scale production with a higher speed chip as a result. Keep using FPGAs to figure out the core you want (or to play with as many as you want), but if you decide to put it into a mass-market item, an ASIC is probably the way to go.
FPGAs are cheap in smaller quantities. Once you scale up ASIC production the per-unit cost falls well below FPGA chips and they're much faster.
AMD used to fab chips, and sent some work to TSMC or IBM. Now they've spun off Global Foundries and still use TSMC.
So, yeah, I see your point about companies doing custom fabs for other companies.
Fujitsu what?
Well, as others have said, there can still be indirect harm from the images being traded. These kids are usually still alive, unlike Lizzie Borden. Catching the people doing the direct harm, though, and preventing more of it are more important to me than the recordings.
BTW, yes, I was molested by neighbor when I was little. So anyone who hasn't been really needs to not tell me I don't understand.
"The really big problem is, when something does end up not working it's harder to figure out what's causing it to break and impossible to fix without reinstalling the OS."
So... it's just like regular Windows?
Only whore servers wear so much rouge. Teach your server some proportion.
My point is that trading it is awful, but preventing further production of it is more important to stop. If the recording doesn't exist, it can't be traded.
It's the RIAA. They're probably upset that there's not more investigation into the copyrighted backing tracks used in the child porn.
I think the counterpoint is that at the point it's being traded the harm to the child is done.
OS/2 has also been renamed and is still being sold by a different at around $260 a seat.
http://www.ecomstation.com/where_purchase.phtml
If IBM was to open source OS/2, not only would Microsoft be all over them (it was, remember, a joint development effort), but they'd probably be in violation of the agreement with eComStation which allows that company to modify and continue selling the thing.
Houston is in eastern Texas. Ever heard of the Johnson Space Center? Or gasoline?
Don't expect Texas, which is a state, to do anything about the Federal court district in Texas, which is a Federal court run by the Federal government. Do you understand the difference between a state and a federation of states?
A user of American customary units can measure the same person in feet and inches or just inches of height, or in pounds and ounces or just pounds and decimals of pounds, or just in ounces if that's really the desire. We even have scales that work in kilograms, believe it or not.
"urban Chicago" is kind of redundant. It' a metro area with over 12,000,000 people.
Hey, as soon as your country fields a pro team according to the same rules, petition to get it included in Major League Baseball.
You may not realize this, but there's a team in Canada (there used to be two). Many of the players come from the Caribbean nations and South America. Some come from Japan (where the game is also popular).
The Little League World Series, which is totally separate from the MLB championship, does include the world by the way. The championship brackets are formed of the eight US regions and the 8 non-US regions formed as to get enough teams to play. Little League World Series. The Us champions play the international champions to determine the world champions.
This isn't because we try to exclude the rest of the world. It's because the rest of the world isn't playing organized baseball as much as the US.
Thanks for attempting to invalidate another person's private experiences and opinions. As a supposed professor of something or other, you should probably know that's impossible.
A foot is 12 inches, not 11.
Why in the world would you need a fence post every foot?
What type of fencing are you using that requires 2/3 to be more accurate than somewhere between 9/16 and 11/16?
If your fencing is that precisely demanding, why not use a caliper with thousandths of an inch?
37.36 cm? 373.6 mm? You place fence posts to within a tenth of a millimeter? Really? Bullshit.
The American way of measuring screws, taps, nuts, and dies isn't Byzantine at all. It's perfectly natural to measure the diameter of the threads, the diameter of the shaft without the threads, the distance between the threads, and the thickness of the threads. What's not very helpful is that we have so many different and non-standard combinations of those. The "screw number" system is a list of standardized sizes. The reason there are 00 and 000 screws rather than -1 and -2 screws is that '-', '.', and similar marks can be difficult to read on old, scratched, dinged, divotted, grimy, oily parts.
I have never owned a car built after 1978 that didn't include kilometers per hour on the speedometer. I have also never had a single problem crossing the border into Canada in an "American" car, many of which are built in Canada anyway.