StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Just a link.

To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, "Niagara 2" - named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community - whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

Uh...what?!

An outstanding move on Sun's part. I recall when Sun open sourced an earlier chip, Scott McNealy was asked by some retarded analyst "What if Intel comes out with a chip using that same design?"

"That would be cool."

In fact, last year IIRC another company did in fact manufacture SPARC based chips using the earlier open sourced designs from Sun. As I see it, Sun can only win by opening up the SPARC architecture (and indeed, given the dominance of x86/64 chips, I'd argue they have absolutely nothing to lose).