- Sunday, 15 November 2009
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He is drinking at the Harrow when he should be at the plough
Sun open sources second chip design
SUN SAID it has handed the design of it Opensparc T2 RTL (register transfer level) processor to the free and open source community through the GPL licence.
The open source tactic is aimed at courting academics who can now fiddle with the design to their spoddy hearts' content.
Sun said five major US universities had become official Opensparc Technology Centers of Excellence. Each has a minimum two-year commitment, to fiddle with the threading.
The Opensparc is based on the Ultrasparc T2 processor, a commodity processor with eight cores and eight threads per core running the Solaris 10 operating system.
Sun's first OpenSparc T1 processor design, let loose in March 2006, has been downloaded 6,500 times, the firm said.
SpokesSun, David Yen, launded the success of open sourcing hardware, and the interest it has created amongst developers, universities and customer.
"The number of downloads have (sic) been impressive and we're confident we're expanding the market for Sun technology," he beamed. µ
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6500 or 65,000?
(1) will certainly get a positive note in computing history books
(2) given academic lifecycle, doubt it could have meaningful market impact over the chip's lifetime. 
(3) unless, of course, uni's frntically start feeding back design upgrades? Hint to Jonathan @ Sun: seriously sponsor a "design improvement" competition, fresh student minds could bring unexpected gems
(4) back to reality: this is as good as it gets of an opportunity for China, India, and other wannabes to get up to speed at little cost; hopefully not exclusively for military purpose -- one can dream, right?