The first one up was Rock, the successor to Niagara, or more to the
point, the next big thing in the whole CMT line that Niagara started.
Where Niagara had small FP-free cores, Rock is supposed to be a full on
Sparc chip with few compromises.
SUN ANNOUNCED THREE new shiny things today, Rock, Niagara and Neptune. Nothing hugely technical, more of a "they exist" type of thing.
The first one up was Rock, the successor to Niagara, or more to the
point, the next big thing in the whole CMT line that Niagara started.
Where Niagara had small FP-free cores, Rock is supposed to be a full on
Sparc chip with few compromises.
It is claiming to have 16 cores on a 65 nanometre process, but if you
look at the size of Niagara today, well you have to wonder how it is
going to pull it off. We will know soon because it is due in about 18
months or so, today's announcement was that it taped out.
That brings us to Niagara, and the news here is that it got a speed
bump from 1.2 to 1.4GHz along with a doubling of memory to 64GB. No
word on upgradability, but since it is a speed bump, it should not be
all that big a deal.
Next up is a project called Neptune. It is a 'multi-port' 10 GigE
network chip that supposedly brings line rate 10GE to servers. The
first rev is aimed at Niagara boxes, but it will come to others,
specifically x86 servers later on.
Basically, Sun is now officially talking about the two products and
launching one. Tech details are really sparse, but that is sure to
change soon. Rock and Neptune look interesting, Niagara is just
incremental. More when we get it.
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