|
|
|
|
|
|
by panick21_
343 days ago
|
|
|
Sun had some funny stories around this too. When they came up with their multi-core system, and they used code from 10-15 years earlier for traces. And then said 'well, nobody actually uses floating code' so we don't need it. Of course over those 10 years Floating point became much more common and stand. Leading to a chip that had one FPU for 8 cores, basically meaning, even minimal floating point would destroy concurrency. Arguably Sun had already lose the chip war and this was just making them fall behind further. They did market it in quite well. And a lesser known thing that I couldn't find much information on is that Sun also worked on VLIW chip during the 90s. Apparently Bill Joy was convinced that VLIW was the future so they did a VLIW chip, and the project was lead by David Ditzel. As far as I am aware this was never released. If any Sun veterans have any idea about this, I would love to know. |
|
|
https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t1-pag...
The T2 is also open, and places an FPU in each core.
https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...
When there is such complaint about closed firmware in the Raspberry Pi, and the risk of the Intel ME and other closed CPU features, I wonder why these open designs are ignored. Yes, the performance and power consumption would be poor by modern standards.