Tuesday August 07, 2007 More Open Chips
As a member of the Interim Governing Board of the OpenSPARC community, I got a note a few days ago from the Sun Microelectronics team telling me some great news. The new low-energy, high-performance chip they have designed, codenamed Niagara 2, is now available as the UltraSPARC T2. But much more importantly, they're releasing all the source code for it under the GPL v2 and asking OpenSPARC to look after it.
OpenSPARC has been quite a surprise to me. The Board met last week to explore the shape of the community governance and we have a pretty coherent draft prepared. Even during the formative stages, though, we've seen amazing effects caused by OpenSPARC, including the tremendous work of David Miller and the Linux crew, leading to commercial support Ubuntu on SPARC by the good folks at Canonical. It was evident from the "Open Source Hardware" panel at OSCON that this area is still an adventure, but "The World's First Free 64-bit CMT Microprocessors" are inspiring innovation and change beyond anything Sun could have achieved alone.
The new chip is still great for tasks like web serving, but now has higher throughput and much, much better floating-point capabilities. Even more interesting is the fact that the openness is paying off. We'd already seen projects in China and the UK to create OpenSPARC derivitives for the embedded market; today, Jonathan writes about a new OEM. What next? A laptop?
Posted by webmink
( Aug 07 2007, 02:52:05 PM PDT )
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links for 2007-08-07
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More sane and intelligent analysis from Glyn.
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This is why we'll be travelling hand-luggage only when we go to Rome soon.
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Welcome to Sun, Louis. Stay independent, and call me if you need support on that.
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"Shuttleworth also accused Microsoft of using its financial muscle to get vendors to sign patent-related deals with it knowing that such agreements will split the community." Yep. Rember, it's always a poker game for them.
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Foreign-owned BAA shows as bad a set of instincts for British life as ever. Their disdain for civil rights and consensus reflects their attitude towards their customers' customers.
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Is your ISP (or employer) modifying web pages before you see them? Seems some do to insert advertisments. Visit this research page at the University of Washington to find out.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 07 2007, 01:21:43 AM PDT )
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