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Industry
leaders join forces to combine industry's first 64-bit open-source
multi-core, multi-threaded microprocessor with industry-leading 65nm
Virtex-5 high-performance FPGA
Heidelberg, Germany September 8, 2008 At the International Conference
for Field Programmable Logic and Applications today, Sun Microsystems,
Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) unveiled a
feature-rich, high-performance programmable OpenSPARC evaluation
platform. The platform provides academic researchers and hardware
developers with a flexible OpenSPARC-based platform to create,
customize and deploy next-generation applications for a broad set of
end markets including supercomputers, industrial, scientific and
medical (ISM), aerospace & defense, and storage and networking.
"Our collaboration with industry leaders such as Xilinx will continue
to drive the momentum and expansion of the UltraSPARC ecosystem," said
Mike Knudsen, vice president, business development and marketing for
Sun's Microelectronics unit. "The microprocessor industry is steadily
shifting towards CMT architectures, and this new OpenSPARC FPGA
evaluation platform puts us in a prime position to enable faster
time-to-market for our customers."
"The OpenSPARC Evaluation Platform will help microprocessor pedagogy
to leap out of the textbook into the students' hands" said James. C.
Hoe, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
Carnegie Mellon University. "This is a powerful enabling asset in
teaching and research, especially at a time when we are striving to
understand how to best deploy and leverage parallelism in future
microprocessor systems."
Based on the power of an open-sourced 32-thread UltraSPARC T1
processor and combined with the high-performance Xilinx 65nmVirtex-5
FPGA technology, the platform will provide a foundation for innovation
across a range of disciplines including; computer architecture, logic
design, compiler techniques and parallel programming. Based on its
programmable architecture, the platform allows multiple design
iterations providing faster time- to-market, greater flexibility and
reduced complexity.
"Today's designs demand more processing power, higher reliability,
and increased application intelligence," said Ivo Bolsens, chief
technology officer for Xilinx. "Combining Sun's multithreading
processing technology with our industry-leading silicon and design
tools provides a solid platform for academics and developers to build
and test novel ideas in hardware and software design."
University Donation Program Proliferates Adoption
Sun and Xilinx also announced today the development of a joint
University donation program, facilitated through the OpenSPARC
University Program, whereby academic professors can apply for grants to
help kick-start curricula and university research programs.
Applications are specifically encouraged for the development of
high-performance, multi-thread and low-power computing applications.
For more information, visit www.opensparc.net/edu/university-program.html.
Availability
The Sun and Xilinx-based OpenSPARC FPGA development platform is immediately available through Digilent. Visit www.digilentinc.com/v50sdk to order.
About OpenSPARC
OpenSPARC.net is the genesis of a vision by engineers, technologists,
evangelists, and executives at Sun Microsystems, Inc. to create a
larger community where open conversations and collaborative development
projects spawn dramatic innovations around chip design. Individual
programmers as well as representatives from universities, industry
associations, supporting software companies, foundries, entrepreneurs,
large corporations and visionaries have already begun to participate in
this expanded community.
Since the launch of the OpenSPARC T1 processor in March 2006, over
9,000 OpenSPARC T1 and OpenSPARC T2 processor RTL files have been
downloaded. For further information please visit: www.opensparc.net.
About Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs
The 65nm Virtex-5 FPGA family leads the industry with over 90 percent
market share. It is the fifth generation in the award-winning Virtex
series built upon the industry's most advanced triple-oxide technology,
breakthrough ExpressFabric technology and proven ASMBL architecture.
The Virtex-5 family features four domain-optimized platforms for
high-speed logic, digital signal processing, embedded processing and
serial connectivity applications. Visit www.xilinx.com/virtex5 for more information.
Read the original article: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-09/sunflash.20080908.1.xml
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