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It's a legacy processor, but the UltraSPARC T1 is the first thing I thought of when I saw the title... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 https://en

by chasil 2y ago

It's a legacy processor, but the UltraSPARC T1 is the first thing I thought of when I saw the title... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 This legacy CPU is actually open source, along with its successor, the T2. https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc.html https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc.html

bpye 2y ago
I wonder if we would have seen Sun continue to release the RTL for future SPARC cores had they not been acquired by Oracle.
- crest 2y ago
  Maybe, but it's not like the T1 or T2 had been successful designs. Idea 4x (or even 8x) SMT to hide L2 (and to an extend L3) like cache latency from an in-order architecture feels didn't work out. Not many users have only parallelizable integer workloads. I suspect Sun got desperately tried to do what they could on their dwindling budget within the constraints of 64 bit SPARC. It's massive architectural register file and fixed sized register windows had to be pain to implement in an out of order uarch. I would love to gain more insight into how Fujitsu pulled this minor miracle off as the swan song SPARC.