Sun documents the T2 core

THERE ARE TWO bits of news from the OpenSPARC community today, a new book and a new educational initiative. The book is free, the educational initiative costs whatever college credits are where you go to school.

If you remember, Sun opened up the design and RTL for the Niagara and Niagara 2 CPUs, and has been aggressively promoting their use as learning tools.

The last step was Sun putting a T2 core on an FPGA and selling it to anyone who cares to meddle where, up until now, only dragons dared. That is all fine and dandy if you know what you are doing, but most people don't.

That brings us to part one of today's announcement, a new book. It is called OpenSPARC Internals, and it covers how to tweak and customise the open source core. Basically, it is the manual that everyone has been looking for, no more trolling the forums to get what you need piece by piece.

In another interesting move, Sun self-published the book, and is giving away the PDF for free. If you want it, you can grab it here, or buy it from Lulu for $19.90 here. I am not sure what is more interesting, the book itself, that they are giving it away for free, or Sun validating Lulu in an official way. Three for one.

The other new bit is a collaboration between Sun and Europractice, a non-profit CPU research and teacher training programme. The goal is to allow 650 affiliated research institutions across Europe to access teaching materials based on the Niagara/CMT cores. They want to hand you everything you need to make a college course around the CPU.

There are also ties to more materials, training tools, and fabs. Basically, if there is some bright little bugger in your class that makes a worthwhile project, you can get it fabbed, but probably not very cheaply. In any case, they are working with companies up to and including UMC and TSMC to get this done, so your homework could be made by the millions.

You can say one thing for sure, Sun sure has a long term plan. The outfit didn't just throw out the code and let it lie, they put out tools, documentation, training, and even an FPGA/emulator setup.

With today's announcement, you can take a college course based on a real and current CPU, and end up with a production chip if you so choose. All the pieces look complete now, and are even accessible to the average hobbyist for a reasonable cost. Not bad. µ