The platform is aimed at customers developing applications for supercomputers, industrial, scientific and medical markets, aerospace, defense, and storage and networking, Xilinx said in a statement.

"The microprocessor industry is steadily shifting towards CMT architectures, and this new OpenSPARC FPGA evaluation platform puts us in a prime position to enable faster time-to-market for our customers," said Mike Knudsen, vice president, business development and marketing for Sun's microelectronics business unit, in the same statement.

It is thought that Knudsen was referring to processors that support multiple threads of computation on a single chip as in chip-multi-threading (CMT) but the acronym was not expanded.

"This is a powerful enabling asset in teaching and research, especially at a time when we are striving to understand how to best deploy and leverage parallelism in future microprocessor systems," said James Hoe, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, in the same statement.

The platform includes a 32-thread UltraSparc T1 processor implemented on a 65-nm Virtex-5 FPGA from Xilinx, and is intended for R&D around computer architecture, logic design, compiler techniques and parallel programming. The programmable architecture of the platform allows multiple design iterations.

The kit includes the ML505-V5110T board plus a 1-Gbyte compact flash card, a 256-Mbyte DRAM module in SODIMM form, a SATA cable, a USB programming cable, a DVI to VGA adapter and a 6A power supply.

"Combining Sun's multithreading processing technology with our industry-leading silicon and design tools provides a solid platform for academics and developers to build and test novel ideas in hardware and software design," said Ivo Bolsens, chief technology officer for Xilinx, the same statement.

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