What have people said about OpenSPARC
From Jason Hoffman, CTO, Joyent Inc.
"The UltraSPARC T1
processors are
supercomputers on a chip, with half the power and cooling needs of
Intel Xeon chips. There's no competition today for servers built with
Sun CoolThreads technology."
From Karen Anaya, CEO, SPARC International
"Sun's open-sourcing of a 64-bit SPARC processor implementation opens
SPARC in a new and exciting way and paves the way for the next Internet
build-out. SPARC International is delighted to see the devoted SPARC
community expanding to encompass an even broader range of SPARC
implementations."
From Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media
"Sun's move to open up the design of the new UltraSPARC 64-bit chip is
a new frontier for open source. We've long understood the benefits of
openness and sharing for driving innovation and quality in software
development, but it has yet to be tried for hardware design. While no
one expects garage hackers doing their own chip fabs, there's no
question that hardware designers can learn from each other's work as
readily as software designers, and that design elements taken from one
chip could more quickly advance the development of others. I'm hopeful
that Sun's leadership in this area will encourage similar moves from
other players."
From Richard Stallman, found of the Free Software Foundation
"The free world welcomes Sun's decision to use the Free Software
Foundation's GNU GPL for the freeing of OpenSPARC. We'd love to see
other hardware
companies follow in Sun's footsteps."
For Kip Macy, the author of the FreeBSD port to the Xen x86 hypervisor
"The UltraSPARC T1 processor's approach to throughput computing is
a refreshing change from other architectures and FreeBSD will one day
be able to fully exploit the parallelism exposed by the cutting edge
processor. The T1 is particularly interesting to me because I feel that
its price-performance should, for the first time, make the UltraSPARC
an important participant in commodity computing environments."
From Nathan Brookwood, Analyst Insight64
"SPARC was huge news last year, as Sun dramatically improved the chip's overall
performance and performance-per-watt compared to anything in the market - AMD,
Intel, or IBM POWER. "The performance-per-watt is four to 10
times better than any other chip."
From Richard Fichera with Laura Koetzle and Thomas Powell, Forrester.
"The portfolio of benchmarks and client references for the CoolThreads servers
indicates that Sun delivers on the promises made with the T1 technology announcements."
From Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center
"Sun's decision to release Verilog source code for the UltraSPARC hardware
design under a free software license is a historic step. The future direction of
hardware design will be charted through the same principles of deep
collaboration and free exchange of ideas that were pioneered by the free
software and open source communities. Sun is showing its profound understanding
of the forces shaping our technological future in making this decision."
From Kevin Krewell, Microprocessor Report
"In an unprecedented move, Sun will release parts of the RTL design to the world
for free through OpenSPARC.org. Let me repeat myself: Sun will release the
Niagara RTL for free. This action caught many by surprise, and it will take
some time to understand the impact...will it inspire new companies to seriously
evaluate the SPARC architecture as they do ARM, MIPS, and Power today. It's a
gamble worth taking and may sway more companies to the SPARC architecture. It
may also have an impact on licensing fees that ARM, MIPS, and Power can charge."
From Prof. David Patterson, University of California Berkeley
"Sun is releasing a full suite of open hardware and software offerings
which look very useful for the RAMP project , I am excited by the 64 bit, 32 thread design which can
potentially be mapped into an FPGA implementation. I would like to see RAMP
and Sun work towards making OpenSPARC a new open industry standard."
From Fabrizio Fazzino, Managing Director, Simply RISC
"OpenSPARC is a great opportunity for emerging companies like Simply RISC. We will be
utilizing the OpenSPARC T1 designs to develop a single core version for the
embedded device market, which we would not have had access to previously.
This levels the playing field for us immensely and we are really looking
forward to participating in the OpenSPARC community."
From Stan Hanel, University Program Manager at Aldec
"We are pleased that Sun Microsystems has released their company's latest
OpenSPARC UltraSPARC T1 multi-core processor design to the general public. We believe that
Sun's initiative will allow the OpenSPARC community to more easily and
inexpensively implement custom logic circuit hardware designs by providing
a Verilog source code model of the UltraSPARC T1. To foster this effort,
Aldec will be making its Riviera (tm) Verilog Simulator available as a free
download on a 90-day trial basis."
From Bill Joy, one of Sun's
founders and now a partner with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins
Caufield and Byers
Having launched UltraSPARC 1 almost a decade ago, Bill Joy likes the idea that the processor code can
be available for future innovations. "It's great to see advanced
multi-core technology, like OpenSPARC, made available in this way for
collaboration, education and research."
From Scott
McNealy, Chairman, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
"This company was founded on the principles of openness, community and
competition. In our 23-year history, we've contributed more code to the
open source community than any other organization on earth. Today, we're
breaking new ground by extending the open source movement into the IT
hardware business and removing the barriers for adoption. We're
throwing open the doors of innovation for everyone to participate,
fostering new growth and economic opportunity for Sun and the Internet
of the future."
From Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
"Proprietary technology relegates you either to a niche or to the ditch. We're growing
our market opportunity by steadfastly open sourcing the entirety of our
software portfolio -- from the Solaris OS to Java developer tools -- and now
we're taking the next step by open sourcing the world's most innovative
microprocessor under the GPL. Giving our customers more choice and driving
community innovation expands our economic opportunity and is forcing our
competitors to sit up and take notice -- we are back on offense."
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