Testimonials

From Jason Hoffman, CTO, Joyent Inc.
“The UltraSPARC T1 processors are supercomputers on a chip, with half the power and cooling needs of Intel Xeon chips. There’s no competition today for servers built with Sun CoolThreads technology. ”

From Karen Anaya, CEO, SPARC International
"Sun's open-sourcing of a 64-bit SPARC processor implementation opens SPARC in a new and exciting way and paves the way for the next Internet build-out. SPARC International is delighted to see the devoted SPARC community expanding to encompass an even broader range of SPARC implementations."

From Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media
"Sun's move to open up the design of the new UltraSPARC 64-bit chip is a new frontier for open source. We've long understood the benefits of openness and sharing for driving innovation and quality in software development, but it has yet to be tried for hardware design. While no one expects garage hackers doing their own chip fabs, there's no question that hardware designers can learn from each other's work as readily as software designers, and that design elements taken from one chip could more quickly advance the development of others. I'm hopeful that Sun's leadership in this area will encourage similar moves from other players."

From Richard Stallman, found of the Free Software Foundation
"The free world welcomes Sun's decision to use the Free Software Foundation's GNU GPL for the freeing of OpenSPARC. We'd love to see other hardware companies follow in Sun's footsteps." 

For Kip Macy, the author of the FreeBSD port to the Xen x86 hypervisor
"The UltraSPARC T1 processor's approach to throughput computing is a refreshing change from other architectures and FreeBSD will one day be able to fully exploit the parallelism exposed by the cutting edge processor. The T1 is particularly interesting to me because I feel that its price-performance should, for the first time, make the UltraSPARC an important participant in commodity computing environments."

From Nathan Brookwood, Analyst Insight64
"SPARC was huge news last year, as Sun dramatically improved the chip's overall performance and performance-per-watt compared to anything in the market - AMD, Intel, or IBM POWER. "The performance-per-watt is four to 10 times better than any other chip."

From Richard Fichera with Laura Koetzle and Thomas Powell, Forrester.
"The portfolio of benchmarks and client references for the CoolThreads servers indicates that Sun delivers on the promises made with the T1 technology announcements."

From Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center
"Sun's decision to release Verilog source code for the UltraSPARC hardware design under a free software license is a historic step. The future direction of hardware design will be charted through the same principles of deep collaboration and free exchange of ideas that were pioneered by the free software and open source communities. Sun is showing its profound understanding of the forces shaping our technological future in making this decision."

From Kevin Krewell, Microprocessor Report
"In an unprecedented move, Sun will release parts of the RTL design to the world for free through OpenSPARC.org. Let me repeat myself: Sun will release the Niagara RTL for free. This action caught many by surprise, and it will take some time to understand the impact...will it inspire new companies to seriously evaluate the SPARC architecture as they do ARM, MIPS, and Power today. It's a gamble worth taking and may sway more companies to the SPARC architecture. It may also have an impact on licensing fees that ARM, MIPS, and Power can charge."

From Prof. David Patterson, University of California Berkeley
"Sun is releasing a full suite of open hardware and software offerings which look very useful for the RAMP project , I am excited by the 64 bit, 32 thread design which can potentially be mapped into an FPGA implementation. I would like to see RAMP and Sun work towards making OpenSPARC a new open industry standard."

From Fabrizio Fazzino, Managing Director, Simply RISC
"OpenSPARC is a great opportunity for emerging companies like Simply RISC. We will be utilizing the OpenSPARC T1 designs to develop a single core version for the embedded device market, which we would not have had access to previously. This levels the playing field for us immensely and we are really looking forward to participating in the OpenSPARC community."

From Stan Hanel, University Program Manager at Aldec
"We are pleased that Sun Microsystems has released their company's latest OpenSPARC UltraSPARC T1 multi-core processor design to the general public. We believe that Sun's initiative will allow the OpenSPARC community to more easily and inexpensively implement custom logic circuit hardware designs by providing a Verilog source code model of the UltraSPARC T1.  To foster this effort, Aldec will be making its Riviera (tm) Verilog Simulator available as a free download on a 90-day trial basis."

From Bill Joy, one of Sun's founders and now a partner with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers
Having launched UltraSPARC 1 almost a decade ago, Bill Joy likes the idea that the processor code can be available for future innovations. "It's great to see advanced multi-core technology, like OpenSPARC, made available in this way for collaboration, education and research."

From Scott McNealy, Chairman, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
"This company was founded on the principles of openness, community and competition. In our 23-year history, we've contributed more code to the open source community than any other organization on earth. Today, we're breaking new ground by extending the open source movement into the IT hardware business and removing the barriers for adoption. We're throwing open the doors of innovation for everyone to participate, fostering new growth and economic opportunity for Sun and the Internet of the future."

From Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
"Proprietary technology relegates you either to a niche or to the ditch. We're growing our market opportunity by steadfastly open sourcing the entirety of our software portfolio -- from the Solaris OS to Java developer tools -- and now we're taking the next step by open sourcing the world's most innovative microprocessor under the GPL. Giving our customers more choice and driving community innovation expands our economic opportunity and is forcing our competitors to sit up and take notice -- we are back on offense."