Geek.com: Sun annihilates the competition with new servers

Yesterday was a banner day for Sun Microsystems, which had a press release frenzy of 9 separate items. Some news of note:

1. NetBeans 4.1 (Sun's Java IDE for developers) is being released absolutely free for everyone on the planet. All you have to do is download the 134 MB toolkit (as I did the other day) and you're ready to go. It's really quite nice, albeit written in Java so it's a little slow. Still, you can get a "Hello World" program in about 5 minutes. If you follow Sun's online tutorial on how to write Java code, any self-respecting Windows-based C/C++ programmer should be up and running and developing graphical apps in just a few hours.
2. Sun breaks some world records with its new massively threaded T1000 and T2000 servers. They deliver 5x (!!) the performance using one-fifth to one-third (!!) the power, and they trash Xeon, Itanium, Opteron, and pretty much everything in real-world server work. Still, these machines are rather specialized, so don't look to grab one for your desktop hoping to get 400fps in your favorite game. Sun refers to these new servers as "Eco-responsible," stating that they use "CoolThreads" technology. Okay. Sun also signed up some big names for support: Oracle, Symantec, and BEA, just to name a few.
3. Sun has taken what I believe to be an unprecedented step and opened the doors to the UltraSPARC T1 processor source code! For those who don't know how this works, I'll explain in a greatly simplified manner: everything a microprocessor can do is written in a type of "programming language." That language contains source code, and, once compiled, it produces the thing that is taken to a semiconductor fab so you can say: "Here, build me one of these." What Sun is doing is releasing that source code (written in Verilog) along with all of the tools necessary to simulate and run the new processor on existing platforms, allowing anyone who wants to to not only look at the innards of Sun's 64-bit processor, but also to throw some more and different logic units at it to see if you can enhance it (no small task). Sun is hoping to capitalize on its long history of openness with regard to not only software, but also the hardware related to the UltraSPARC processor line. Still, this release of the "source code" remains a huge step forward, and is one I've never heard of on such a large-scale for such a well-known and respected device from a company like Sun. This would be similar to Intel saying, "Here's the source code for our next-gen Pentium core." That just wouldn't happen, so this really is quite a thing. Visit the OpenSPARC website for more.

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