Mercury News about Niagara II

Mercury News reports about Niagara II in Sun takes on AMD and Intel with new chip.
But i find HP´s stance to Niagara II the most interesting part :

"Sun's Niagara and Rock platforms are proprietary, niche architectures," HP said in a statement e-mailed to the Mercury News on Friday. "With the industry moving toward standards with processors built by AMD and Intel, HP believes that Sun's Niagara 2 is the wrong way to go for customers and out of step with the market."

It´s more of this “Sun-is-propritary-and-niagara-a-niche” bullshit. At first, a processor like UltraSPARC T1, that is fully GPLed can´t be proprietary, as everyone can use this processsor for own designs. It´s based on a specification you can get from sparc.org to develop your own processsor. Solaris and Linux (Update: Free-, Open- und NetBSD, too ;) ) runs on SPARC. Try to get VERILOG files for Itanium … And with Itanium, HP has vast experiences with niche plattforms. It´s a miracle to me, what forces keeps this architecture afloat, especially as they underdelivered again with Montvale again. From my view, HP is afraid of the silicon we announce real soon now.