Sun's Microelectronics Group has been busy over the past few months with announcements including a new foundry partnership with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer Co. and more recently announcing an OpenSPARC agreement with the China Ministry of Education catching the eyes and ears of industry watchers.

The second announcement is the first overseas expansion of Sun's OpenSPARC educational program which began in 2006 when Sun opened the underlying design of our advanced microprocessors to developers and provided educational support to six U.S. universities. The new deal extends the program to five Chinese universities.

As a result of the agreement, the Chinese MOE can educate students on the latest processor innovations, including chip mulithreading (CMT) and software coding that take advantage of multithreading. Chinese universities that participate in the program will develop their own textbooks, workshops and labs programs; the Chinese MOE and Sun will jointly promote the best practice throughout China. Students will benefit from the curriculum, and because it is based on Sun's open architecture they are empowered to accelerate innovation on top of the OpenSPARC design.

“China will have hundreds, if not thousands, of technically trained people who will be well versed in Sun's processor design and programming, These students will go off tho first jobs, influencing employer's server purchases.” said Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64.

Jonathan Schwartz called the announcement “an extension of the OpenSPARC ecosystem to embrace the world's fastest growing technology community and a launching point for similar relationships with economies and universities worldwide, and an unmistakable endorsement of Sun's open source approach to building opportunity across software, systems and microelectronics.”

"Sun is really the only company I know of that open- sources their hardware designs," said Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 , referring to the practice of offering blueprints for free. "They've only been doing it for two years, so the jury is still out on whether the strategy will work." 

Read the original article: http://blogs.sun.com/analyzethis/entry/opensparc_gains_momentum

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