Poonacha Kongetira is the Director of the Niagara Processors group. He's been part of the Niagara CPU design team from the early 'whiteboard' design stage at Afara Websystems, through the tapeout and eventual productization of Niagara at Sun Microsystems.

Here's his perspective: "I think multithreading as implemented on Niagara is a very powerful tool to increase performance within a low power envelope. It'll be very exciting to see how an open source version of the Niagara design will enable the community to leverage these concepts and techniques an make even higher performing more efficient products. I believe the architecture lends itself readily to not only the server space, but also to the networking, storage and even the embedded spaces. This may require further hardware integration of IP, and could be an interesting area for the community."