Sun Microsystems opens its best microprocessor under the GPL

The director of the company Sun Microsystems reported interesting news in his blog: it was decided to publish the architecture of the new eight-core UltraSPARC T2 processor under an open-source GPL license. With a total frequency of threads (eight threads on each of the eight cores), 89.6 GHz is the fastest processor on the market at the moment. Integrated PCI-Express and 10 Gb / s Ethernet interfaces, one FPU processor and a crypto processor per core, hardware support for ten ciphers, eight 4 MB L2 memory banks and other built-in functions allow developers to call their brainchild a full-fledged “server-on-server” chip.

Now a competitor company or anyone can absolutely legally start the production of replicas, clones of this processor, also known under the code name Niagara 2. Moreover, Sun will only be happy to help independent manufacturers by providing them with all the necessary documentation, design files, test packages etc. All this will soon appear on the OpenSPARC.net website.