Sun Microsystems Launches OpenSPARC Project
Sun Microsystems Launches OpenSPARC Project
Posted Dec 6, 2005 21:01 UTC (Tue) by adulau (guest, #1131)Parent article: Sun Microsystems Launches OpenSPARC Project
They should use the Open Cores (http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/opencores/mission) approach to release the specification as a real "free" hardware.
Posted Dec 6, 2005 21:24 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (2 responses)
Three cheers for Sun for this move.
Posted Dec 6, 2005 22:55 UTC (Tue)
by gnb (subscriber, #5132)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Dec 6, 2005 23:40 UTC (Tue)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
You can give pretty good approxymation for 99.999% cases - enough for GCC developers, for example (even if may be not for hand-assembly). But then you'll be forced to admit that your CPU can sometimes spend 50-80 CPU ticks as heater without when no actual work is done - and that's just embarassing...
Specs at the level Sun are proposing are most unusual in and of themselves. Note that Intel, for instance, no longer even publish *instruction timings* for their CPUs (although AMD do).Sun Microsystems Launches OpenSPARC Project
> Note that Intel, for instance, no longer even publish *instruction Sun Microsystems Launches OpenSPARC Project
>timings* for their CPUs (although AMD do).
Annoying though that is, I suspect it's almost unavoidable given the
complexity of modern CPUs ("well, it'll take this many cycles unless it's
a mis-predicted branch, or one of the registers it uses has a dependency
on a previous instruction, or ..."). In fact I'd be interested to know
which vendors have real instruction timings for their CPUs as opposed to
statistical averages based on simulating (hopefully representative)
benchmark kernels.
Sun Microsystems Launches OpenSPARC Project