Sun's Unconventional Thinkers Contrarian Minds

Rick Hetherington has reason to feel good. In the high-risk business of developing microprocessors, he and the team have been on a roll. Hetherington, you see, is chief technology officer in Sun's Microelectronics group and has been responsible for driving the company's innovative approach to processor design. Namely, chip multithreading, or CMT. "We started out with 32 threads in 2005 ... and here we are in 2008 -- just three years later -- and we're up to 256 threads," he says. More