The opportunities revealed by Sun's open-source CPU

By releasing the code for its new Niagara 2 processor into the open source community today, Sun is paving the way for its underlying architecture to eventually pop up in wireless and other embedded systems, and maybe even in future game consoles.

In announcing the open-sourcing of its multi-threaded Niagara 2 processor today, Sun Microsystems is looking at expanding the underlying computer architecture into new markets -- a strategy that earlier reaped successful results around both Sun's earlier Niagara 1 processor and IBM's open sourcing of its own Power processor architecture.

In a New York City press conference held to roll out Sun's Niagara 1 servers back in 2005, then-Sun CEO Scott McNealy pointed to plans by Sun to build a "community of developers" around the new servers, which were capable of running Linux on top of Sun's own Solaris operating system.

Because Sun leveraged its OpenSparc Initiative to release the processor code, the community that McNealy mentioned turned out to include hardware as well as application software developers.

An Italian company named Simply Risc, for example, took advantage of the code's availability to create a single-core processor with a wireless interface to mobile devices.

But also over the past few years, IBM adopted a similar approach with its Power processor.

Hardware developers have since been able to use the IBM Power architecture as the basis for embedded systems used as the inner workings of automotive electronic systems from Freescale, as well as within the Sony PlayStation 3, pointed out Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, in an interview with BetaNews this afternoon.

"By opening up the code, IBM allowed developers to customize the architecture for different kinds of applications," King told BetaNews.

Now, with the open sourcing of Niagara 2, at least one hardware developer is already at work on customizing Sun's second-generation Niagara processor.

Polaris Micro, a China-based company, will reportedly use an OpenSparc variant in a system board for systems in the data storage and telecommunications industries.