Website comment
This post isn't about chips or software. It's just about the website. Since there doesn't seem to be an obvious "webmaster" contact point on the site, I'm posting here.
If you look at the page:
http://opensparc.sunsource.net/nonav/index.html
It has overone megabyte of inline images!!
I pity anyone trying to view the site over dial-up. Even on basic broadband it'd take 20 secs to load completely.
The basic problem is that some large images are being used but their size is being restricted in the HTML. So the browser re-sizes them (which actually makes them look worse). The problem images are:
ultrasparcT1_overlay_die.jpg - 678x680 283KB
US-t1-CoolThreads-combo.jpg - 920x767 367KB
marctremblay.jpg - 570x712 374KB
To help, I created some resized versions (resized to how big the HTML sets them to be):
http://www.aceshardware.com/chris/reduced/marctremblay.png
http://www.aceshardware.com/chris/reduced/ultrasparcT1_overlay_die.png
http://www.aceshardware.com/chris/reduced/US-t1-CoolThreads-combo.png
These are 87KB in total. A 12x improvement! Converting them to GIF or JPG could save more - I used PNG because it's lossless.
You may want to put the full size versions in a "photography" section or similar.
PS Any chance of an equivalent of ultrasparcT1_overlay_die.jpg but just for a single core? ie an annotated single CPU core, showing the L1 caches, register files, FUs etc.
