Beginning yesterday and running for the next few days marks the anniversity of euphoric change that swept across Europe. The sudden opening of checkpoints in Berlin on the night of November 9, 1989, was more than just one moment in history. It was the beginning of an exciting and sometimes difficult chapter for Germany, a chapter that is still being written 17 years later. All said, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the German people made unification and a united Germany the firm anchor for Europe and the World it is today. The immensity of the event and the subsequent integration stands as a benchmark and an example for all the world. At stake was much more than Germany.
The fall of the Wall was an event experienced by the citizens of Berlin and Germany, East and West, by eyewitnesses who happened to be there, and by millions of people around the world who watched it happen live on television. What did it feel like just before this moment in time? Could you see the change afoot? By way of example, let's try to make this discussion relevant to our life today...
At first pass, it looks like a shipment that arrived yesterday on the anniversary of the historic day, but it is actually more as it anticipates change. By the way, the interesting thing about the T1000 is that it can run 32 threads in parallel. That is FOUR times more than CELL. The T1000 features the UltraSPARC T1 processor, the same core featured at OpenSPARC. Now, whether we consider the Sun Fire T1000 server as the alternative developer platform while we get a new board developed or just a great server, time will tell, but be certain, it is time to “tear down this wall.”
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
There is change afoot!
P.S. (JFK) Ich bin ein Nurnberger.
10 comments:
Sounds both intresting and sad. Sad, because Genesi pushed PowerPC computing and intresting because it may be another good project.
I wonder if there's market for such platform? Alternaive SunOS HW?
Are you leaving PowerPC?!
What about the EFIKA? At 160 EUR it is cheap enough to be interesting even at the low specs. What you did with BestComm makes the 5200B fly like the Pegasos. :) Please don't stop this. It is the beginning of something very new and very good. The AMD "500MHz" "1.1W" GeodeGX processor actually runs at about 266MHz with a total system draw of 10W without the disk. The specs are pretty similar to an EFIKA -- 128MB DDR RAM, two USB ports, audio, 2.5" disk, modem (no ethernet) and a graphics port (graphics is built in to the Geode). If you add a 10GB HDD you could end up easily with a retail $299 almost anything product. With a low-profile Radeon and a DVI connector Genesi can provide a better machine.
This is great. It will keep IBM on its toes. There have been no substantial Power developments ever since Apple left the Power Architecture a year ago. Where is that 3ghz 970MP? Red Hat, Novell and PA Semi have left power.org, Terrasoft has started selling Intel Macs...
T1000 VS POWER5
The Sparc processor consumes almost 4 times less power than the POWER5 processor from IBM (180 Watt vs 770 Watt) and manages to outperform it. Server efficiency is 22 times higer.
I'd immediately buy a sparc developer workstation that has the Genesi firmware. The ability to use standard ATI/Nvidia graphic cards on Sparc make this a no-brainer. Power of RISC, GPL processor with standard graphic cards and Genesi community. GREAT!
The only thing I'll miss is Altivec. But Pegasos 8641D should fill that need :-)
I am with you and may the FORCE be so!
I think I know what you are trying to do. What you are doing is porting your firmware to various boards and trying to convince the people that made those boards to license the whole firmware package. Your ability to bring up graphic cards is great, many want it. But, could it be that instead of porting your firmware to Sun's boards (or your board with SPARC), that you take their firmware and extend it with your x86 emulator 'module'. Your module can be proprietary, their firmware can be open source. This would be like ATI making a binary module for open source linux and open source BSD and open source Solaris...
Genesi would make a binary module for open source PAPR, open source SLOF, open source uboot, open source Dinc, open source SunOF, etc.
Am I right? :)
/Kristian
I was right! Just don't leave completely. Tom :D
Did you know that two out of four Power.org founder level members are also opensparc.net members?
Look here
the T1 is a very good machine, but i hope you' ll stay with ppc too, at least in embedded and oed market.
on a side note, uniforming firmware wuold be a win win situation for both sparc and ppc.
finally i hope to see opensolaris like reference os.
Don't worry we are not leaving Power completely. We will be starting a T1000/T1000 board Developers Program. More on this shortly...
Very wise move. Designing a SPARC-board for
the OpenSparc-Community can only be a good
thing. A unified firmware would really help out.
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