Sun has announced the creation of a new Microelectronics Group.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the formation of a Microelectronics group to be led by executive vice president, Dr. David Yen. The Microelectronics group will oversee the developments in network, cryptography and high-performance computing and serve as a supplier to Sun’s existing Systems businesses, in addition to serving OEM customers across the globe. Yen, who previously led Sun’s Storage business will be succeeded by Jon Benson, a Sun senior vice president. Both Yen and Benson will report to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun president and CEO.

Sun has released the Netra X4200 M2 carrier-grade server.

The 2U, 20-inch Sun Netra X4200 M2 server is Sun’s first NEBS Level 3-certified rack server powered by AMD Opteron processors. It is designed to power solutions such as media servers, voice over IP (VoIP) solutions, signaling gateway controllers, element management systems, network traffic analysis systems, operation management systems, and data management systems.
* The first x64 Netra Rack server
* One or two dual-core Next Generation AMD Opteron processors
* NEBS Level 3 certified, ETSI compliant
* OS flexibility: Solaris OS, Linux, and Windows
* Compact: 2RUs high, less than 20 inches deep
* Up to four disk drives
* Hardware RAID (0 + 1) support
* Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM)

Sun has hired Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and chair of the Linux Standards Base, as its new Chief Operating Platforms Officer.

Version 1.4 of the OpenSPARC T1 specification has been released:

OpenSPARC T1 v1.4 adds significant new functionality as well as new platform support in its hardware bundle. On the design side, it adds knob to create single core, single thread implementation of the OpenSPARC T1. This, we believe, will be useful in creating multi-core designs that do not include hardware threading. Additionally, it also provides an option to create FPGA implementation from the base design. This FPGA option creates a fully synchronous design with better utilization of on-chip FPGA resources like Block RAMs and Multipliers.
And finally, version v1.4 also includes an option to remove Stream Processing Unit (SPU) from the design. Since SPU is essentially an on-chip hardware accelerator for cryptographic functions, one can choose to remove it for more general purpose CPU implementations.

I’ve removed the Google AdSense ads and replaced them with a link to my Wish List.

The O’Reilly ads on the site (which are run in exchange for a book every now and then) will be reduced to 120×60 sizes once I receive the smaller versions from my contact there.

Sun has released an “early access” version of its “LDoms” software that enables partitioning of UltraSPARC T1-based systems into domains, each capable of running an independent operating system.

ThinGuy’s weblog at Sun has a video demonstration of Win4Solaris, software from Virtual Bridges that enables Windows XP to be run in a virtual machine on a Solaris x86 system.

Sun has released version 1.1 of their “Cool Stack” Solaris-optimized open source software collection.

The software in version 1.1 includes:

Apache 2.23
MySQL 5.0.33
PHP 5.2.0
Perl 5.8.8
Ruby 1.8,5 rubygems 0.9, rails 1.1.6
Memcached 1.2.0
Squid 2.5
Apache Tomcat 5.5.17

Sun has released its Java Enterprise System 5.0 collection of application, identity management, and availability software suites.