Niagara 2 news galore

To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, "Niagara 2" - named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community - whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

In the interim, on Monday a reporter accidentally violated our news embargo, which set off a flurry of press coverage.

And then being the leader in power efficiency, we paid special attention to how we can manage power internally, so we do have features like clock-gating, extensive clock-gating throughout the core. So if one is not running a floating point application, the clocks are not being submitted to that floating point unit.

"At the same time, we will [also] roll out a developer beta program in which we will provide access to Verilog RTL design file and test suites, so that we can get early feedback to refine our open source process and eventually complete the open-sourcing [of UltraSparc T2] by the summer of 2008," he explained.

Sun is not saying much about performance when it comes to the T2 chips, but the T2 is expected to have about 2.5 times the throughput performance of the T1, and Victoria Falls is expected to nearly double that again, with a 65 percent performance boost over the T2's at the system level.