What happened to opensparc's idea of an open cpu?

2 points by iFire 14y ago ↗ HN

What happened to opensparc http://www.opensparc.net/? People worry about proprietary hardware, but here's a GPL 64bit cpu and there's no excitement?

As Oracle has control of Sun's assets, if Oracle wanted to release SPARC T3 as GPL, the Verilog would have already been released.

I've gone to their website and it's bitrotting. I can download archive files, but there's no cvs access. I want to see the information mirrored to keep the the cpu alive. Maybe store the cvs on github.

2 comments

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wmf 14y ago ↗

It still costs millions of dollars to fab an OpenSPARC, so it's not really that open. I can't think of any real problems that it solves.

iFire 14y ago ↗

Someone shrunk it so it fits on a FPGA.

Also, does it really cost 5 million to fab at TSMC? I need to figure out what process size and to fill in the quotes http://www.mosis.com/prices.html.

They make lots of 40 chips.

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much... gave an example of a 40 lot run costing 3k.