Amazing Revolutions

 Yesterday, Sun Microsystems made the most astounding announcement of the decade - if not the century. They have officially announced that they are going to license it's UltraSPARC T2 architecture to the public under the terms of the General Public License, as part of it's OpenSPARC project.
 Sun is known (as far as business practices) for it's internal investments. It constantly invests into it's self ($2Bn per year in R&D alone), making proprietary programs for their proprietary computers that run on their proprietary processors. This essentially means that when a business comes to Sun for their own solutions, and Sun would give them a complete package with no additional setup needed. But lately, they've been opening up their components. Solaris, their operating system, has already been made free to the general public. Above that, it's available for non-Sun systems like x86-64. UltraSPARC T1 itself has already been released under GPL as well, which has, in the words of Sun's representatives, caused a great amount of value to be added to the arch.
 Which brings us to the UltraSPARC T2.

 Sun's UltraSPARC T2 is the second in the "Niagara" series, and takes the firm foundation of the T1 to new heights. With the UltraSPARC T2, developers are given a single microprocessor chip with up to eight cores in it (double Intel's latest), each core supporting eight simultanious threads at 1.4GHz each. Doing the math, you have sixty-four threads and a net clock speed of 89.6GHz. Not too long ago, that would have been considered a supercomputer. The T2 also comes with some essentials already included right in the microchip, such as PCI Express (x8 1.0), two separate 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections (Not too shabby, considering that your average computer only has a single 10/10 megabit connection, and usually not built into the CPU), and four dual-channel FBDIMM controllers. It also has a couple of unbelievable hardware features built in, like one FPU and tow ALUs per core for extensive math requirements (Calculating the millionth digit of pi has never been so fun!) and eight encryption engines in every chip, each one capable of encoding and decoding DES, 3DES, AES, RC4, SHA1, SHA256, MD5, RSA-2048, ECC, and CRC32. It's internal memory is a bit low, but 4MB isn't too shabby for an L2 cache.
 Possibly the greatest thing about this chip, though, is that it's licensed under the GPL. Because of this, it is possible for any capable organization or individual to create one, which means that it's highly possible that you'll see some branded by AMD, NEC, LG, and other high-density semiconductor companies. It can also be changed so long as the derivative is also licensed under the terms of the GPL. It's likely that it will be ubiquitous within a few years of use, meaning that some version of Windows will likely be ported for it.
 At such a level of advanced multilevel processing, The UltraSPARC T2 is a great leap in terms of bringing massively-parallel computing to the masses. I'm only sad to see that BeOS doesn't run on it. Oh well, there's hope for Haiku.

Oh, and FYI, T2 PWNz the PS3's Cell.