Processor News

Sun Microsystems Inc., today announced a multi-year program called the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, which will foster innovation and recognize some of the most interesting initiatives within Sun-sponsored open source communities worldwide. To participate in the program's first year, Sun has selected six communities: GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC. Prizes are expected to total at least $1 million (USD) a year.

Scott McNealy took his "software wants to be free" act to the NICSA Technology Summit 2007 in Las Vegas, even featuring a showman's hypnotic cadence. And it was a fine presentation, if you believe one thing: Open Source = Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA).

"I'm now going to describe a strategy that makes Wall Street nervous," McNealy, chairman and co-founder of Sun, told the crowd of several hundred technology executives from the mutual funds industry. "It's one called sharing."

(At regular intervals he'd interject, almost like a chorus: "Did I mention it was free?")

In August 2007 Sun Microsystem announced the UltraSPARC T2, code-named "Niagara 2". The processor contains up to eight processor cores, which are able to execute 8 threads simultaneously each.

With each processor core equally accessing a common large L2 cache and the shared main memory via an internal crossbar the UltraSPARC T2 processor is a shared memory machine on a single chip with a flat memory (UMA = uniform memory architecture) from the programmer's perspective.

The entry Sparc server lines from Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu-Siemens got an upgrade this week as the two companies began selling new servers based on Sun's "Niagara-2" Sparc T2 multicore processor. The Sparc T2 is a considerable upgrade to the first-generation T1 chips, and even though it runs a little hotter, the roughly doubling of performance in the new Niagara servers more than makes up for the extra heat, yielding substantial improvements in performance per watt.

Today Sun Microsystems Inc. will unveil three new servers: two rack- and one blade-based on the UltraSparc T2, (aka Niagara 2) chip it announced in August.

At an event in Las Vegas later on Tuesday, Oct. 9, the Santa Clara, Calif., company is expected to roll out the 1U T5120 and 2U T5220 rack servers, as well as the T6320 blade. Pricing for the two rack-mount servers begins at about $14,000 and $15,000, respectively, and the servers are available now; pricing for the blade begins at about $10,000 and will be available at the end of this month.