Sun Niagara 2 CPU Now Open Source 158
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."
Home fabbing (Score:3, Interesting)
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If you were making embedded systems you could afford to pay a fab to make a batch, and likely save money over buying a new CPU from Sun/Intel/AMD. But this kind of thing isn't possile or cost effective for one off runs.
Re:Home fabbing (Score:4, Informative)
Take, for example, the recent $2.5 Billion Intel plant in China [cnbc.com].
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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 [cnbc.com].
Yeah, but the Intel plant is designed to create thousands, millions, of low-power / high-performance devices. A hobbyist might be content with just a few.
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Another side effect of the cost has been the challenge to make use of older fabs. For many companies these older fabs are useful for producing designs for unique markets, such as embedded processors, flash memory, and microcontrollers. However for companies with more limited product lines, it's often best to either rent out the fab, or close it entirely. This is due to the tendency of the cost of upgrading an existing fab to produce devices requiring newer technology to exceed the cost of a completely new fab.
So it sounds like the second hand obsolete market for fab equipment is a real steal.. and with the industry moving to 300mm wafer sizes soon..........
Re:Home fabbing (Score:5, Interesting)
A billion is low-end fabs. High end cutting edge or even near-cutting edge technology costs much more. Maybe a billion for "old-school" tech like 130nm.
No, your best bet is to just pay the few million to have someone fab it for you - there are very few companies that have their own fabs and can do it inhouse (e.g., Intel, IBM, AMD, Freescale (Motorola), Samsung, Toshiba), at least, cutting edge fabs. Low end fabs can be had for cheap (1um and larger), which is great if you don't particularly care about density (e.g., Gemplus - those smartcards have HUGE silicon for 32k memory and not much more).
Most companies are fabless. They contract out the fab work to places like TSMC (amongst others - they're all well known). These include even heavyweight giants like nVidia, Altera, Xilinx and such. The only real downside is that delays can happen if machinery breaks down, or everyone submits a fab order simultaneously that causes backups at the fab and thus delays shipments. The turnaround time (from tapeout to getting chips back) can be 3 months or more. Luckily, most people test their designs out on FPGAs first to work out their bugs before committing them to silicon. Even places like Intel use computer simulation, discrete circuits, FPGAs, and such before they fab it out to their own fabs just because of the turnaround time.
Of course, what I want to know is what's the smallest FPGA one can put this on and still have something workable. (Where things like bus timings and memory clocks still in the realm of "practical" and "in spec").
Re:Home fabbing (Score:4, Interesting)
By using a Shuttle run, where the fab batches together a bunch of designs and runs them through using a single mask set, you can get 20 or so instances of a 130 nm design for roughly $100K. Of course, this assumes that you've already done the layout and verification steps yourself...
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http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/1940203&threshold=-1 [slashdot.org]
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http://www.mosis.com/ [mosis.com]
Packaging is crucial to making the thing work too, however.
CAD tools to convert the RTL into GDS is also very expensive.
Re: Home fabbing (Score:2)
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I just witnessed a minor miracle, I think (Score:1, Interesting)
Honestly
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Slowly I turned....
Openbsd (Score:4, Insightful)
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Any insiders want to post anonymously about how we got here with Sun?
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Re:Openbsd (Score:5, Informative)
This is... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is... (Score:5, Funny)
Sun should market it as such, after all, you never want your server to go down.
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I didn't know far-sightedness is a known side-effect of V1@9r@?
Blindness [bbc.co.uk] is, though...
Time to see a medical professional?
Relevance to Joe Consumer (Score:2)
blueprint of a modern multithreaded special-purpose server
CPU means to the average Joe.
Probably not much, unless Joe has got an degree with a specialization
in computer science or electrical engineering.
Re:Relevance to Joe Consumer (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of (bachelors level) computer science degrees don't involve anywhere near enough focus on hardware issues for the "blueprint" of their CPU to be of any real use. The low level source of a CPU is of direct use to a vanishingly small subset of people. But, so is the source of the Linux kernel. I've never submitted a patch to the kernel. I wouldn't know where to start, frankly. And, I'm moderately qualified to do so, having done a fair amount of C, and a bit of embedded programming. I'm certainly more qualified to tinker with the kernel than I am with CPU source.
But, that sort of isn't the point. The fact that you and I wouldn't know where to start with something like that doesn't change the fact that such people do exist. And, there are some people who can't do anything with it, but are really curious to know more about what it is, and this may be the spark that makes them decide to learn. You and I may get the result of one of those guys having access to this. so, even though my own project plans won't be influenced by the availablity, I do expect that you and I will be effected by it indirectly.
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Which, incidentally, also applies to open source software. Many people sneer at open source software, saying that they and 99% of all people wouldn't know what to do with it anyway, so why should they care. You just wrote a nice explanation for those people.
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I don't think open source hardware is too i
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While software folks may not understand the hardware world, its quite sad that hardware folks rarely understand the software side as well.
Not any more. back when coding apps/games/demos in assembly was the thing to do, you had *plenty* of guys that knew the hardware and software inside and out. And while they're only 30-40 years old now, it's just a redundant practise.
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Commodore released excellent books in the way of the ROM Kernel Manuals for the Amiga.
what was the topic about?
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I've never submitted a patch to the kernel. I wouldn't know where to start, frankly.
I have also never submitted a kernel patch, but I want to try to answer your excuse. Start at kernel.org [kernel.org]. Read through the Bugzilla Open Issues [kernel.org]. I have read this book [oreilly.com] and it does an excellent job introducing the tools and techniques needed to work with the kernel.
To attack the meat of the article (Open Source Sun CPU), it is valuable because it gives the specialized community a rallying point to get behind. There might be less than 100,000 people qualified to do anything meaningful with this... but
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It might not too, but its a least something to consider.
What about patents? (Score:2)
Does this mean they could attack a company that started selling their processor or one based on this information with a patent?
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FPGA Huggers (Score:4, Interesting)
How big an FPGA would be required to run this? Can you really download the configs and run it on an FPGA at a reasonable speed? Which Xilinx model?
How about running Linux on that simulated Niagara2, like you can uCLinux on a Microblaze [wikipedia.org]? The exciting part would be replacing parts of the OS, like the TCP/IP stack, with "HW" configs for really high performance, customized per app. None of your processes use some dozen instructions? Drop their microcode in favor of a faster multiplier...
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But ya, it can be done.
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The Niagra is already pretty optimal in terms of reducing the area required for unused instructions. And there are very few instructions that aren't used in a typical kernel+apps on a Sparc. Also microcode doesn't take up much space, especially if you
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What you did was "make a mistake" by converting "the best" into "the only". Check your facts before snidely telling me to do so.
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Also, it seems like writing a C program, but it's not. Remember that VHDL doesn't run line-by-line, most of the time is running all the lines at once. It's a description language, not a programming language.
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The primary reason why FPGA's aren't used in things such as network cards has nothing to do with technical feasibility but rather cost. ASICs are significantly lower-co
FPGA lovers (Score:2)
Many of us are lucky to fit a Z80 into what we have.
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Z80s aren't that big.
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Government Technology Embargoes (Score:2)
What are the implications of Sun doing this? There are countries that wouldn't be allowed to buy their finished Niagara servers that could now, given time, reproduce their technology. Doesn't this make a mockery of the U.S. technology embargo against certain countries?
Perhaps I'm simply missing something, but if AMD can get into hot water over their processors showing up in Iran why does Sun get a pass for
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But seriously, this design info is just about useless without a $Billion fab full of equipment that these countries also aren't supposed to get. But why would they bother with all that when they can just buy quad core consumer PCs that rival the performance of these chips, and which are available to them on the open market from most any country other than the USA?
New GPL can of worms opening... (Score:2)
For example, what constitutes derivatives and what can be considered mere-aggregation.
Also can I license an RTL block from another vendor and combine the two in a new chip ?
OSFPPC!! (Score:3, Funny)
You don't? How tragic. I'm afraid you'll have to hand in your geek card. In the meantime I wonder if the OLPC guys would consider a OSFPPC (One Silicon Fab Plant Per Child) program.
Is it really released? I can't find a link (Score:2)
Re:Is it really released? I can't find a link (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.opensparc.net/opensparc-t2/downloads.html [opensparc.net]
Be warned, the 233MB file decompresses to about 1.5 GB.
All right... (Score:5, Funny)
we all might not have silicon fab in the basement (Score:2)
Sun is the new Bell Labs (Score:4, Interesting)
IMO, Sun is one of the only companies left innovating.
-Google is just rehashing old ideas.(Gmail? come on....I had webmail 10 years ago.)
-Oracle(eh... RDBMS v45.2 anyone?)
-IBM(If I see one more pointless black-and-white commercial about "ideas" I'm going to scream. IBM should listen to their marketing department and instead of telling us to "Stop thinking, start doing" they should create something that isn't AIX)
And, I will be the lone voice and dare to say that Microsoft, yes them, has a few teams that are starting to 'get it'. Apple is doing a great job with human-computer interaction.
Show me new, for I am tired of your old.
Bootstrapping issue (Score:2)
They wouldn't have done it if N2 was competitive (Score:2)
The only business reason I can imagine that Sun would do this is the hope that lot's of Niagara foundries would bloom and thereby cut their costs for sourcing the part.
Re:Open Source friendly? (Score:5, Informative)
The RTL code (Verilog) is GPLed:
http://www.opensparc.net/faqs/licensing/ [opensparc.net]
Other people have built and are shipping product with the prior T1 version, the SimpleRISC folks:
http://www.srisc.com/?s1 [srisc.com]
The licensing pretty much says "Here, have it, have fun!"
Is the hardware any good though? (Score:2)
My only experience with Sun hardware is from the slow out dated machines we have running here.
Re:Is the hardware any good though? (Score:5, Informative)
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Sun is a lot of things, some unprintable, but stupid isn't one of them. If it can be shown that a
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It's not so much that the FPU is slow as, at least on the T1 (Niagra 1), there was only one of them for the whole chip. The applications the Niagra targets don't really need FPU power (how much FP work does
Re:Is the hardware any good though? (Score:4, Informative)
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See http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/datasheet.pdf [sun.com]
Not clear what the interconnect model is yet.
I personally would like to see the open source T2 re-released with the PCI-X and 10 gig ethernet, as Sun hints they will do once licensing is fixed:
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Re:Is the hardware any good though? (Score:5, Interesting)
Niagara 1, had one FPU per chip. Niagara 2, has more than one.
The way you pose it -- doesn't perform unless you can find the parallelism -- is not the right way. Some clever person found a market where there was parallelism, and that turns the problem around. "Given that I have all this work to do, what's the throughput per watt?" Niagara wins there. And it happened that those people, or a lot of them, didn't have a burning need for floating point.
Or to use a lame car analogy, a schoolbus is no good unless you can find 32 kids to haul, whereas a minicooper is cool and zippy with only two. But if you regularly have 32 kids to haul, and some people do, you want a schoolbus, and a minicooper is not very efficient.
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Seriously, when I ran a workstealing benchmark (which is all about interprocessor synchronization) it ran just as fast at 32 threads as it did at 1. The 1-thread performance is nothing to shout about, but at 16, it's suddenly kicking the ass of every other computer I can get my hands on (because of all the synchronization) and it can do that all the way out to 32. I have heard, through the grapevine, that the Niagara 1 (an
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So they may not be perfect, but they are a heck of a
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I suspect the more stringent licenses are for things that can be embraced and extended, possibly by a particular well-known competitor to Java (;-))
--dave
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Isn't it also released under the GPLv3? Anyway, I'm pretty certain that they chose both CDDL and GPLv3 expressly to be incompatible with the Linux kernel, which could otherwise have all their nice features (like ZFS) leaving OpenSolaris with no advantage over Linux.
Re:Open Source friendly? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for this whole "oh noes!! Linux might takeover from Solaris!!" crap, why do people continue to ascribe the Microsoft world view - everything and everyone is a competitor - to other companies? Sun and IBM and every other normal company (read: not a monopoly) has one business strategy: give the customer what they want. If the customer wants Linux, Sun will sell them Linux. If the customer wants Solaris, Sun will sell them Solaris. If the customer wants Intel or AMD or SPARC, Sun will sell them that. IBM will also sell you Linux or Aix or Intel or AMD or SPARC.. if you want to pay them for that, that's what you'll get. It's only Microsoft who seems to think they can dictate the solutions to the customers instead of the other way around.
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(Actually I'd like them supported on OpenBSD, which they now claim to support, as well)
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This is what I HATE about open source. Too many kids grow up with that "I get everything for free" mentality. And don't try to argue they give back to open source - what's the
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why do people continue to ascribe the Microsoft world view - everything and everyone is a competitor - to other companies? Sun and IBM and every other normal company (read: not a monopoly) has one business strategy: give the customer what they want.
I think you need to remove your anti-Microsoft colored glasses. Every company is aware of their competitors. Every company would love to lock their customers in to proprietary solutions. That's the normal position. IBM was sued for being a monopoly decades ago. Sun competes with Linux. IBM embraced Linux and Sun embraced open source only because they were losing out in their old ways, and they wanted to ride the new waves. They both still have proprietary products. Microsoft only stands out from Su
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The processor is open-source (OpenSPARC), Sun's own operating system port on the processor is also open-source (OpenSolaris), and of course Linux is open-source. If someone wants to go through the labor-of-love to port Linux to SPARC then there's nothing "hidden".
Sun sells x86-based machines that run Linux and I think they'll even sell you a Linux distro to go with the box (of course you don't need to get from them... any distro will do.)
I fail to see the conspiracy angle
sun4m and other "they don't exist, don't ask"'s (Score:2)
Should you run into a SunPC or similar, that will bite doubly for being Solaris only (and for versions that may not be in circulation).
Now if you run into something on the ord
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Re:When is Open Source actually news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When is Open Source actually news? (Score:4, Informative)
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Not quite.... One can burn this into an FPGA. I don't know how fast it would run but if the goal is to study and experiment with processor design then an FPGA is the tool. The purpose ere is to allow people to study and modify the CPU
Wikipeadia of course has some info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array [wikipedia.org]
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Re:21st century business plan (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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The difference is that they are now marketing a lack of lock-in as a value-added service. Previously, migrating away from Sun was hard because you had to port your co
Re:21st century business plan (Score:5, Interesting)
Too bad there isn't a cheap way to get a Niagra (Score:2)
I think DLX and Microblaze is a more elegant low-end implementation of a MIPS-like. And I think SPARC and PowerPC are much more practical and useful high-end RISCs.
I would like to see Sun put together a cheap developer's kit, they could market a Mac Mini type form factor as a J2EE developer workstation or something. But the rest of us could pick one up too to see what sorts of cool projects can be done with it. I'm fine with 4-core or 8-core version o
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In addition, I rolled my own 32-bit SPARC once with only 2 register windows, with the compiler did not control. What you had was a "program" window and an "interrupt" window. So when interrupts happened, rather than having to save the register
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The T1 pipeline is just 6 stages (not terribly deep), while the T2 just adds a bypass stage.
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which points to something like
Perhaps there's a way to ignore these, but I don't know XST well enough.
Sun uses Synopsys for the
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http://fpga.sunsource.net/ [sunsource.net]
The most recent release of the T1 code has a few options for removing functionality (dropping to 1 core and 1 thread) such that it will fit on some of the larger available FPGAs.