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Friday, July 24. 2009

A few days ago there was an announcement of a new SPARC processor. No, not the 1.6 GHz N2. There was a second announcement. Atmel announced the Atmel AT697F AT697F Fully Radiation-Hardened Processor. It's SPARCv8 compatible proc for usage in space where you have to live with high radiation levels. This CPU was testesd with a dose up to 300 Krad. So: SPARC is everywhere ... even high above your heads

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Sun/Oracle at 23:36 | Comments (11) | Trackbacks (0)
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Hmmm, that's interesting. Now, why would anyone use SPARC except for running Solaris? Does it mean some satellites run on Solaris? Which ones?

#1 Bob Koutsky on 2009-07-25 02:47 (Reply)

The reason is not Solaris. It´s a different one. Despite general opinion, SPARC isn´t a propritary architecture. You get go to SPARC International, get the specification for a 100 bucks or so and you can develop and manufacture your own SPARC CPU. This was used by the European Space Agency to develop a radiation hardened version of a SPARC architecture. The development is called LEON, the proc named in the article uses the LEON2-FT design. The LEON2 and LEON3 design are available under the GNU General Public License respectivly under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Being able to get such an architecture essentially for cheap money was the essential reason behind the decision for SPARC (besides of other technical reasons)

#1.1 Joerg M. (Homepage) on 2009-07-25 09:16 (Reply)

I laugh every time I see someone refer to SPARC as 'Sun's proprietary lock-in architecture' and tout x86 instead.

Try making a SPARC CPU legally and an x86 CPU legally and I guess we'll see whose architecture is 'proprietary'..

#1.1.1 moo (Homepage) on 2009-07-27 12:55 (Reply)

Yes, but you can´t get this into the mind of many people ....

#1.1.1.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2009-07-27 14:40 (Reply)

"Now, why would anyone use SPARC except for running Solaris?"

Because, let's face it, the modern UltraSPARC Tx designs are free-as-in-beer, and because, apart from a weirdo memory loads and stores, which stem from a lack of bits in the address registers, SPARC is actually quite a nice CPU to program on (in assembler, no less!) Hey, one even gets a free instruction cycle slot every branch instruction!

So the question really becomes:

why not SPARC? It's F R E E ! ! !

#2 UX-admin on 2009-07-27 16:58 (Reply)

Nice article. I wonder though, are folks with this processor going to run Solaris, Linux, one of the BSDs, VxWorks, or something else?

With hard realtime capabilities, Solaris could be compelling in the environments where this processor will be deployed, but someone would have to do the work to revive a 32-bit SPARC kernel. Might be very fun work, but also non-trivial and very niche.

#3 Garrett D'Amore (Homepage) on 2009-07-27 19:39 (Reply)

at some point x86 may be forced to be opened by regulatory powers. the more society depends on it, the higher the demand for having the underlying infrastructure 'readable'.

opening sparc was a good step, but way to late. right now the future of sparc is very uncertain and even though its an open architecure the capital investments for a competitive cpu are way to high that anybody will go there.

let's see what oracle does.

#4 bro on 2009-07-27 21:55 (Reply)

But SPARC has been open since 1989:

http://sparc.org/aboutOverview.html

Sun did many things too late, but opening sparc was not one of them.

#4.1 Renier on 2009-07-28 20:16 (Reply)

Great stuff, excellent choice : I knew of this architecture in space : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750, but PPC750 is EndOftheLine (paragraph 'Future' in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_G3) which makes further space-software development on PPC undesirable (imho). Cost of software and testing much^2 more than $200K for 1 board. Open Source Hardware Architecture mitigates risk of vendor losing interest (AKA pulling an OS/2 on you).

#5 Michiel (Homepage) on 2009-07-27 21:59 (Reply)

And as far as i remember LEON-1 dates back into the year 2000. So open SPARC is quite an old hat.

#5.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2009-07-28 21:55 (Reply)

sad thing, cpu makers are dying like flies today.
amd is fainting away, via is not able to deliver.
we need a new x86 vendor right now, intel only would be a fucking nightmare.

#6 Jonas (Homepage) on 2009-08-05 09:58 (Reply)

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