The Bright SPARC
- Article 13 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, April 2006
While open source dominates the software industry, open source hardware is only just starting. Rob Buckley looks at Sun's attempts to start a new market
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Sun has also transferred all the intellectual property incorporated into OpenSPARC chip designs into a new body, SPARC International. It now has to license the SPARC design from SPARC International just like everyone else – for a nominal administrative fee that’s covered by the GPL’s clause on charging for source code. “It’s a tiny payment that keeps their administration ticking over. It’s not a great big portfolio licensing that we’re engaging in.”
How much effort Sun is putting into OpenSPARC isn’t clear. While Phipps points out that Sunil Joshi, one of Sun’s vice presidents and a leading light in the semi-conductor design community, is heading up the initiative and “is dedicated to making it work”, Sun hasn’t wowed everyone with the speed of its implementation.
The first OpenSPARC-based chip, the UltraSPARC T1, is already being used in T1000 and T2000 servers, yet the actual source code the whole OpenSPARC project depends upon wasn’t available at the time of writing, three months after the initial announcement of the OpenSPARC project; Phipps didn’t expect it to be available for another two months.
Sun is also backing away from IBM’s approach to raising developer interest by avoiding partner programmes. “IBM haven’t gone open source [like us]. They’ve done creative but traditional partner programmes. Look at Power.org: it looks remarkably like a partner programme to me. This is not a partner programme. This is genuinely releasing source code under the GPL.”
Nevertheless, Sun is clearly hoping that by harnessing the power of open source, it will be able to increase worldwide support for the SPARC chip, which is usually associated with the word “beleaguered”. It is also going for adoption in both server and embedded markets.
To many, the OpenSPARC chip may look massively overspecced for the embedded market: it has eight cores, each capable of executing four threads and is more clearly aimed at servers. Yet, the SPARC chip is used in digital cameras from both Sun and Fujitsu among others, since the increasing image processing requirements of consumer gadgets are requiring similarly powerful chips. The low power consumption of the OpenSPARC chip also makes it desirable for use in portable gadgets. While an UltraSPARC T1 might well be overkill for some applications, the nature of open source means potential manufacturers can repurpose the chip and remove anything they don’t need.
“The characteristics of open source are such that I have no idea what people are going to do with the code,” says Phipps. “We’ve already seen the community porting Solaris to PowerPC and Debian Linux to use the Solaris kernel rather than Debian. I wouldn’t have predicted either of those. But I anticipate people will find a way of embedding SPARC chips.”
But the main hope for OpenSPARC is a revival of SPARC in servers. In particular, Sun hopes that the open source community will be willing to migrate Linux over to OpenSPARC, and has made public the Hypervisor API for the OpenSPARC design, so multiple operating systems will be able to run at the same. Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz says “Linux on Sparc is dead serious. I’m personally talking to leaders in the community. BSD, too.”
However, industry observers such as analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 are not so sure of the likely success of Sun’s move into open source hardware. “I really think it might appeal to some researchers. It’s really hard for me to imagine that a serious manufacturer would go off and make a product out of it.”
Similarly, Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice says, “The time for Linux on Sparc as any kind of major market phenomenon has come and gone – over five years ago now, maybe longer. It just serves to split the available development resources.”
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