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Sun Microsystems is licensing its chip multithreading processor design to a UK company for use in the mobile processor markets
Sun Microsystems, in its continual rollout of
processors from its new Microelectronics division, is making a
multithreaded chip for various embedded and mobile devices.
Sun said Tuesday it is licensing a suite of
patents to ARM Holdings, a U.K.-based company that makes embedded and
graphics processors and processors for mobile devices such as cell
phones and personal digital assistants.
Sun Microsystems is licensing its chip multithreading processor design to a UK company for use in the mobile processor markets
Sun Microsystems, in its continual rollout of
processors from its new Microelectronics division, is making a
multithreaded chip for various embedded and mobile devices.
Sun said Tuesday it is licensing a suite of
patents to ARM Holdings, a U.K.-based company that makes embedded and
graphics processors and processors for mobile devices such as cell
phones and personal digital assistants.
ARM plans to use Sun's Java chip
multithreading, input/output, memory and power management technologies
in a variety of connected devices.
This would be the first licensing of Sun's
scalable processor architecture (SPARC) chip multithreading (CMT)
technology in mobile devices after using it primarily in Sun servers,
said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for SPARC CMT technology.
CMT is a processor design that allows
multiple sets, or threads, of instructions to travel through a
processor at the same time. Multithreading makes more efficient use of
the processor, thus reducing energy usage. Sun's Niagara 1 and 2
processors offer CMT.
"We have not licensed chip multithreading in
that [mobile] market," Azhari said. "What we are doing here is
unleashing this huge innovation that we have at the silicon level, with
CMT, to enable other companies to be successful and build that
marketplace."
Sun created the Microelectronics division in
late March to develop processor technology for use in Sun hardware but
also to license the technology to other firms. The strategy is to help
companies develop more technology products that will generate new
demand for Sun's servers, storage and other IT infrastructure.
However, this does not mean that Sun is about to begin developing mobile devices, Azhari said.
The first licensing deal from the
Microelectronics group was of 10G-byte Ethernet networking technology
to Marvell Technology Group on April 3.
Read the original article: http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1021782295
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