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Sun is moving forward with plans to develop a processor with as many as 16 cores on one piece of silicon, quadruple the capacity
available now.
Sun said Thursday it has completed the "tapeout" stage of the coming
"Rock" processor it expects to have ready for market in the second half
of 2008. Tapeout refers to the final stage of the design of the chip
before the specifications are sent to the manufacturer. In Sun's case,
that's Texas Instruments Inc.
Sun is moving forward with plans to develop a processor with as many as 16 cores on one piece of silicon, quadruple the capacity
available now.
Sun said Thursday it has completed the "tapeout" stage of the coming
"Rock" processor it expects to have ready for market in the second half
of 2008. Tapeout refers to the final stage of the design of the chip
before the specifications are sent to the manufacturer. In Sun's case,
that's Texas Instruments Inc.
"We're still on
schedule," said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for Sun's SPARC-CMT
(scalable processor architecture for chip multi-threading) processor
programs. Multi-threading refers to the capacity of one processor to
perform multiple transactions simultaneously.
Rock is designed to power high-end computer systems, said Azhari and is based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor, also known as
Niagara, which was introduced in November 2005. UltraSPARC T1 powers Sun's T1000 and T2000 servers.
A next generation processor, UltraSPARC T2, is due out in the second half of 2007.
"The trend in the industry is to the multi-core processor, but Sun has invested fairly early in this," said Jean Bozman, an
industry analyst with the research firm IDC.
Other
chip makers, such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, have introduced
dual-core chips, while Intel already has a quad-core chip on the market
and one from AMD is expected soon. Eight-core chips are also in
development, but Bozman says Sun has been on a more ambitious
development path than others.
"This is where
some of Sun's R&D development money went," she said, when Sun
suffered a slowdown after the burst of the dot-com bubble in the early
2000s
And while Niagara-powered servers have been deployed in "network-facing" environments, such as with telephone carriers, Rock
is being positioned for use on servers in data centers, Bozman said.
Also Thursday, Sun unveiled a chip, dubbed Neptune, that operates in a 10G bit Ethernet CMT environment. It hastens movement
of data from in and out of servers and across a network.
Sun also upgraded its T2000 Niagara-based servers, increasing processor speed to 1.4GHz from 1.2GHz and doubling memory capacity
to 64G bytes.
Replacing older Sun servers with Sun's T1000 servers produced demonstrable savings for Planet Out, a San Francisco-based company
that operates multiple Web sites for the gay and lesbian community.
"We had a very challenged operational environment," said Tom Cignarella, senior director of technical operations at Planet
Out. "We had a ridiculous number of servers for the traffic we had."
Planet
Out completed in August 2006 the replacement of as many as 400 outdated
servers with 60 T1000s, a move which improved the efficiency of its
system, reduced the space needed for its data center and cut its power
consumption by 40%, Cignarella said.
Read the original article: http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/011807-sun-rock-processor-project.html
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