Tweak a Niagara on your desk

SUN AND XILINX just announced a really interesting twist on the the whole idea of an open CPU core, hardware that you can run it on. Instead of having to spend a few million to tape out your changes, you can just run it on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA in the comfort of your own home.

For those of you who don't remember, Sun put out Niagara, aka the T1 as open source a while ago. Then they did the T2, aka Niagara 2. It is not the first time that Sun put the code for the T1 on an FPGA, but it is the first one you can buy as a product.

Diligent is selling them as complete turnkey units for a mere $1999, $750 if you have academic credentials. With that, you can download, twiddle and tweak the core until you are bored, then upload the results.

It may not be fast, it runs at about 62.5MHz equivalent, but it is likely much faster than emulating it. To put it in real-world terms, think of the speed of the real T1 as booting XP on a mid range machine, and the Xilinx version as booting Vista on the same box. It may be slow, but it works as long as you don't change much or sneeze.

If you are a qualifying academic institution, and want to play with this setup, Sun and Xilinx have a grant program for you. You can read about it here, the short story is, apply and you will get an answer in about a month. Given the cost of applying, it can't hurt to try.

This is quite an interesting idea, there are soft cores out there that anyone can use, but nowhere is there a real server class multi-core, multi-threaded CPU with most if not all of the modern buzzwords available, much less completely open. For teaching, it seems to be a rather unique tool, and the same goes for hobbyists.

Get a few today and start modding. µ