On 5/27/2012 1:22 AM, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
On 27 May 2012, at 04:49, Jerry Kemp wrote:
I double checked my calendar, and it wasn't 1 April. :)
AFAIK, SPARC is the most open CPU available.
Oracle haven't released any specs or source for T3 or T4.
Therefore, AFAIK, SPARC /was/ the most open CPU available.
Without future developments being put out into the open, it's unfortunately a
dead end.
SPARC has suffered the same fate as MIPS - both are nice, open
architectures, with several good freely-available designs, and
unencumbered ISAs, but their primary developer is either dead or no
longer contributing to the effort.
The problem is the CPU design is a huge black art, and it requires a
massive investment to create a new current-generation CPU. Since the
T2 design is still available, I'd be interested in seeing if anyone
would make it for embedded/appliance use. Frankly, the T2 (with some
minor improvements) makes a really, really nice:
NFS server
Static web appliance
SAN head
load balancer/firewall
All of the above would work nicely with some form of IllumOS as the base OS.
It's all going to come down to whether or not the T2 is a good enough
base to do incremental improvements on (or adapt for other purposes), as
that is where the efforts are going to have to be based.
Personally, I've been batting around the idea of using the T2 chip on a
PCI-E card hooked to 1-2 10GbE chips, doing crypto and TCP-Offload, to
see if it would be worth it, though I'd have to use an embedded Linux to
drive the thing.
-Erik
-------------------------------------------
illumos-discuss
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be
Modify Your Subscription:
https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
