14 DAY TRIAL // Sun Microsystems has recently made a few comments regarding its plans related to the Sparc processors, especially the UltraSparc Niagara 2 processor that is about to be launched soon together with the Neptune networking chip. Sun seemed to pay a lot of attention to the open source concept and now it switches to the other side joining the open source companies and gets more involved through the share of the Niagara 2 designs.
"It is our goal of eventually open-sourcing these Sparc processor designs," stated David Yen, head of Sun's newly re-created microelectronics group.
Besides the software that will be made open, Sun also intends to release hardware designs. Sun seems to consider that the open source community is more responsive due to its familiarity aspect, more trustable and also predisposed to trust open platforms.
"Through exposure and familiarity, we reduce the entry barrier, even if just mentally, for people to adopt Sparc processors in various places, including our system platform products", Yen said.
Sun's UltraSPARC T2 microprocessor, also known as Niagara 2, is a multithreading, multi-core CPU. It is the planned successor to the UltraSPARC T1 and is expected to be included in new systems from Sun in the second half of 2007. The processor will be available with eight CPU cores and each core is able to handle eight threads concurrently so it will be available to process up to 64 concurrent threads. Among other new features Niagara is said to include: increased, up to 1.4GHz, speed bump for watch thread, 2 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports with packet classification and filtering, increased L2 cache, up to 4MB, 8 encryption engines and so on. Sun also said that the Niagara 2 processor would deliver twice the performance of the T1 when running transactional workload.