Those are pretty neat. Didn't know about the Apple many-core. Far as OpenFirmware, I think it should be mandatory along the lines of something like First Sale doctrine. If we bought a device, we should be able to control its use by law. We can't do that with software due to copyright. That implies an open, mandatory firmware available that lets us load our own software in.
I knew you'd like that. The temlib is impressive because of its completeness, though it seems like hobbyist thing, maybe useful for retrocomputing and software archaelogy ;) But this comment http://temlib.org/site/?p=567#comment-210 makes me realize that the design doesn't even fully utilize the almost EOLd Spartan-6 (a low end one, even in its heyday). Now imagine what could be done in something new? Combined with the Utleon3 implementation of the Microgrid concept from http://svp-home.org
On something like this f.e. http://www.achronix.com/products.html ?
AFAIUI this would smell like Soft Machines VISC, only better, because FREE!
"makes me realize that the design doesn't even fully utilize the almost EOLd Spartan-6 (a low end one, even in its heyday)"
Yeah, it's impressively efficient. Adds more evidence to our argument that SPARC implementations can be technologically competitive in efficiency with ARM, etc.
"AFAIUI this would smell like Soft Machines VISC, only better, because FREE!"
It could happen. Achronix's FPGA's are badass, too, hitting up to 1.5GHz. Their dev boards are actually cheaper than Oracle's SPARC servers, too, with added benefit of putting custom logic for accelerators in there w/ SPARC I.P.. I haven't studied much of VISC, though, so I have little comment there.
I'll comment on those other links later tonight as I'm off to do some more paying work. :)
