The release of OpenSPARC T1 version 1.7 is announced in the weblog of Durgam Vahia, Engineering and Partnership Development Manager in the OpenSPARC group at Sun, who writes, "... with this release, [the] community can port a truly multi-core, multi-thread 64-bit commercial processor design on FPGAs." A download of OpenSPARC T2 is also now available. He adds that OpenSPARC now supports two different FPGA boards of different capacities.

The first FPGA board is the OpenSPARC Evaluation Board, which hosts a single Xilinx XC5VLX110T device. The second one, called BEE3, is from a start-up company called BEEcube. BEE3 has four larger size Xilinx XC5VLX155T FPGA devices with support for up-to 64GB memory

Some of the notable features of this release are:

• Dual core T1 design with each SPARC core residing on one OpenSPARC FPGA evaluation board. Each core could be single thread or four-threaded (allows up-to 8 threads)
• Ability to boot Ubuntu Linux as well as OpenSolaris on single core and dual-core reference designs

• Support for the BEE3 board that allows up-to 4 SPARC cores to be mapped on a single board (allows up-to 16 hardware threads)
• This release also supports Xilinx ISE and EDK version 10.1.

As the OpenSPARC T1 Processor download page reports, OpenSPARC T1 is the open source version of the UltraSPARC T1 processor, whose CoolThreads technology makes it the highest throughput and most eco-responsible processor ever created.

The OpenSPARC T1 processor is a breakthrough discovery for reducing data center energy consumption, while dramatically increasing throughput. Its 32 simultaneous processing threads, drawing about as much power as a light bulb, deliver the best performance per watt of any processor available.

A download is also available for the OpenSPARC T2 Processor, which is derived from the UltraSPARC T2 processor, the industry's first "server on a chip", packaging the most cores and threads of any general-purpose processor available, and integrating all the key functions of a server on a single chip: computing, networking, security, and input/output (I/O), plus tight integration with the Solaris operating system.

More Information

OpenSPARC T1 Processor Download

Slidecast: All About OpenSPARC

OpenSPARC Internals

Multithreaded Application Acceleration with Chip Multithreading (CMT) Multicore/Multithread UltraSPARC Processors (whitepaper) Login or registration required. [...read more...]

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