Subsequently, Les Kohn (employee #2), a microprocessor designer for: Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC; Intel i860 and i960; National Semiconductor Swordfish[3] took the basic idea and developed a product plan.
Olukotun searched for venture capital support on the basis that a new architecture could lead to a 10x performance increase in server processing capabilities.
Hetherington wrote memos to Mike Splain, CTO of the Processor group at Sun, encouraging technology acquisition of Afara Websystems.
During the due-diligence process, Brian Sutphin sensed (as in Fermi Wang, the "CEO" mentioned that there were no term sheets on the table) from executives he was interacting with that Afara did not have any alternate sources of funding and reduced the offer from high triple digit millions of dollars to < $500M.
[8] The new CPU architecture of Afara Websystems, which became known as "Niagara", had enough merit to cause a competing internal Sun project under DeSantis' organization, called "Honeybee", to be canceled.
Oracle continued the radical approach of the original Afara SPARC architecture (large numbers of threads per large number of simple cores) with the release of the SPARC T3 processor in September 2010 - the first 16 core commodity central processing unit,[14] yielding another top performance benchmark, but only by a slim margin.
[12] Olokotun returned to Stanford University to head its "Pervasive Parallelism Lab" in 2008, to help shape the future of software, as he did with hardware.
[15] Fermi Wang and Les Kohn founded Ambarella with a focus on high definition video capture and delivery markets.