
Princeton Piton Processor - rbanffy
http://parallel.princeton.edu/piton/#
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nickpsecurity
I keep telling OSS HW people to build on OpenSPARC given you have an ASIC-
proven, badass design to start with. Good to see that they not only did that
but put 25 cores on a 32nm node. We have Raptor trying to get OpenPOWER for a
more open processor, RISC-V designs in the making for multi-core, and the RTL
of a fully-open SPARC with 25-cores ready to go. We also have a need for high-
performance, multi-core CPU's as our root of trust. Anyone see opportunity? ;)

Next step for any academics reading is modifying these suckers to have
extensions like Watchdog[Lite] or CHERI CPU's. Dover is already doing SAFE
with RISC-V. FreeBSD already runs on CHERI, though, so hardest work is done.
Modify OpenSPARC & compiler backend for it as they did their BERI MIPS. Add
I/O MMU & trusted bootloader. Boom! The beginning of a secure, open SOC. :)

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AstroJetson
It's always cool when research projects show that they would work in the real
world. Lots of times they are some professors pet idea and don't really go
anywhere. It will be interesting to see if in a year to 18 months if anyone
else is using OpenPiton.

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mhayenga
Eh, Wentzlaff (professor behind this) co-founded Tilera. He can definitely
make something others could use. I view him doing OpenPiton as an attempt to
give back to researchers now that he has become a prof.

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crudbug
Why not OpenSPARC T2 ?

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dorimonn009
I think it's because of these guys' strong focus on FPGAs. If you dig back on
the opensparc scene a few years back, you'd find almost no materials on the T2
implemented in FPGA...

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crudbug
Yeah, I see some T1 related academic papers. Research on RISC-V [0] with this
hyper-scale architecture would have been a better choice for PI.

[0] [https://riscv.org/](https://riscv.org/)

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revelation
I can think of a lot of exciting custom silicon, so if as an Academic you get
the extremely rare occasion that someone funds you a 32nm chip... why on earth
would you then go and build something that all of the commercial players are
also doing?

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maaarghk
I suspect the grant was to build this chip rather than to go and have fun play
times with a 32nm fab.

