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Specifications for the Sparc chip family have previously been
available to those who pay a licensing fee to the company, but Sun now
plans to release...
... both the specs and the designs, written in the Verilog hardware description language, for free.
Sun
Microsystems is to make the designs of its new UltraSparc T1 server
processors open source in an attempt to win greater support for its
hardware in the developer community.
Specifications for the Sparc chip family have previously been
available to those who pay a licensing fee to the company, but Sun now
plans to release...
... both the specs and the designs, written in the Verilog hardware description language, for free.
These will be accompanied by a verification suite and simulation
models. The information will be distributed by the newly set up
OpenSparc group in the first quarter of 2006.
Suns main Solaris operating system is already open-source and the
company recently made most of its server software open source too.
The latest open-source announcement from Sun came as the company
launched its first servers using the energy-efficient and multi-tasking
UltraSparc T1 chips, previously code-named Niagara.
Each UltraSparc T1 chip has eight processing cores which can run up
to a total of 32 simultaneous instruction sequences. The whole chip
consumes a maximum of 72 watts, which is less than comparable solutions
from Intel. Intels Xeon consumes between 100 and 165 watts.
The new server processor is competing against similar enterprise
processors from IBM, Intel and AMD. Sun hopes the new processor will
help stall its server sales decline, which has seen it fall back in
terms of market share against the top three of HP, Dell and IBM.
The new T2000 server launched this week starts at £4,600 and goes up
to £15,300. The T1000 will arrive in the first quarter of next year and
will cost between £1,800 and £6,500.
Read original article at: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2005/12/07/213323/Sunmakesnewserverchipdesignsopensource.htm
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