Sun has now announced the much anticipated UltraSPARC T2 (aka Niagara 2) processor to the world, and under the GPL too.

The T2 is quite a beast too... it's ONE chip with 8 cores that provides the capability of running 64 threads simultaneously. Add to that multi-threaded 10 Gb ethernet networking, crypto acceleration, PCI-Express I/O expansion and a dedicated FPU per core, and you've got one incredible CPU. There is absolutely NOTHING else on the market that comes anywhere close. Come to think of it, there is only one other 8 core CPU on the market - the UltraSPARC T1.

Once again, Sun is setting the pace in the market. The T1 has been out for quite some time now, and still there is no news of a competing 8 core CPU from the likes of IBM, Intel or AMD.

Come on boys, Sun is kicking ass here.