|
Marvell Technology Group has
licensed the design of "Neptune," a chip technology for building
10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet connections into either servers or
server network cards, Sun said Tuesday. Terms of the deal weren't
disclosed, but Marvell plans to pay Sun royalties.
Sun Microsystems has lured its first chip technology customer since reviving its microelectronics business.
Marvell Technology Group has
licensed the design of "Neptune," a chip technology for building
10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet connections into either servers or
server network cards, Sun said Tuesday. Terms of the deal weren't
disclosed, but Marvell plans to pay Sun royalties.
Using Neptune, Marvell plans to build server-networking
products to sell to others, spokeswoman Diane Vanasse said. "These
products will broaden Marvell's LAN (local-area network) product
portfolio into the server segment, beyond enterprise and consumer PC
markets."
Neptune, formally called the Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology, is geared specifically for multicore processors, said David Yen, who last week was appointed executive vice president of Sun's new microelectronics group.
Yen earlier led the company's development of the UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" processor, which has eight processing engines, called cores, each able to run four instruction sequences, called threads.
With 32 threads total, Niagara is the most aggressive multithreaded
processor, but Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and IBM all have multicore
or multithreaded designs and are moving further in that direction.
"With a traditional network interface design, based on a
single-thread concept, you have a bottleneck," Yen said. Neptune is
designed to recognize the parallelism in the stream of data packets
flowing across a server's network connection, he added.
Sun will employ Neptune technology in both its x86-based and Sparc-based servers. The technology is built into Sun's Niagara 2 processor, a 64-thread chip due to arrive in servers in the second half of 2007.
Read the original article: http://news.com.com/Suns+new+chip+group+welcomes+first+customer/2100-1006_3-6172957.html
|
Get Informed 
