Sun Microsystems today complemented the release of two new servers with some potentially significant changes to its processor architecture licensing policy and the way in which Oracle will price its database for the fresh gear. We covered the Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers earlier today. What's important about the boxes in the context of the licensing and Oracle developments is their use of the eight-core UltraSPARC T1 - aka Niagara - processor. This chip marks the most major development in Sun's UltraSPARC line in a long, long time and gives it a part unlike any other offered by Tier 1 competitors.
Sun has moved to "open source" the UltraSPARC T1's design in a bid to generate outside interest around the chip. The exact details for this plan remain a bit thin, but Sun did say it would publish the specifications for "the source of the design expressed in Verilog, a verification suite and simulation models, instruction set architecture specification (UltraSPARC Architecture 2005) and a Solaris OS port" for the UltraSPARC T1. In so doing, other companies could create versions of the low-power chip to handle other software than the web and application server loads Sun has aimed at with its new servers.
News source: The Register
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