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David Yen, the long-time chip guru from Sun Microsystems
who is often moved around by the company's top brass to troubled
business units, has taken the helm of a new, independent
Microelectronics group. Sun has announced its first OEM customer for
chip technology, and that was a good excuse to get Yen on the phone and
ask him what the real deal is behind Sun's moves.
David Yen, the long-time chip guru from Sun Microsystems
who is often moved around by the company's top brass to troubled
business units, has taken the helm of a new, independent
Microelectronics group. Sun has announced its first OEM customer for
chip technology, and that was a good excuse to get Yen on the phone and
ask him what the real deal is behind Sun's moves.
As we previously reported
two weeks ago, Sun broke its chip design unit away from its System
group to form the Microelectronics group. Yen, who has been shepherding
Sun Sparc processors from the whiteboards to the motherboards for the
past decade, was removed from that position to take over Sun's storage
business in the wake of its acquisition of StorageTek. Having killed
off a bunch of products and integrated the sales and tech teams of Sun
and STK, Yen has now been asked to go back to the chips side of Sun and
turn it into a business unit that has more than one customer (in this
case, Sun itself) and offers products and services that leverage Sun's
substantial expertise in chip design and its resurgence as a thought
leader when it comes to chips, peripherals, and system designs.
A year ago, Sun took some steps to reposition its chip business while
Yen was running the storage business, and it seems highly unlikely that
anything was done without talking to him first, even if he was not
running the Sparc chip unit. Perhaps the most significant step was to
create an open source version of the multithreaded "Niagara" Sparc T1
processor. All of the key design specs plus the hypervisor microcode
and the documentation for the Sparc T1 have been made available through
the OpenSparc project.
Some people are noodling around with the OpenSparc specs. Canonical, the creator of the Ubuntu
Linux distribution, used the OpenSparc materials to do a rapid port of
Linux to the Sparc T1 chip--something that would have taken a lot
longer had Sun not given this material away. In the past incarnation of
Sun, it would have been hard to imagine the company actually courting a
Linux port. And, it is inexplicable why Sun isn't interested in
courting Red Hat and Novell
to do ports to the Sparc T1 chips ASAP and to have Linux running on its
future "Rock" enterprise-class, multithreaded processors, which are due
next year.
The first true chip spin-off from the OpenSparc project was announced
last October, when the "Sirocco" S1 chip from Anglo-Italian chip maker Simply RISC
started shipping. The S1 chip was created by taking a single T1 core
(the real T1 chip has eight Sparc cores, each with four threads) and
implementing it with a Wishbone system-on-a-chip interconnect bridge.
Simply RISC is hoping that the S1 chip is adopted for mobile phones,
PDAs, and other embedded devices.
Sun could, of course, be hoping for a little of that action itself, and
Yen made no bones about the suggestion that Sun might want to do a
variant of the Sparc T1 aimed at cell phones, PDAs, and other handheld
devices. "You never say never these days," he explains, adding that
what Sun is most interested in is increasing the Sparc base. "But Sun
is not a job shop. We are not going to design a Sparc chip for HDTVs.
But we are willing to do something that might be less financially
rewarding to grow the Sparc base." As an example, Yen said that it
might make sense to carve out a single core Sparc chip with a single
thread and create a field programmable gate array (FPGA) co-processor
for systems out if it. "Sun has over 1,000 chip engineers, and we are
trying to leverage the substantial design and packaging expertise we
have in the chip business."
The deal that Sun announced since Yen took over the Microelectronics
unit has nothing to do with the Sparc, actually, but rather on a
multithreaded ASIC, code-named "Neptune," developed by Sun for
supporting multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards that
Sun has licensed to Marvell Technology Group,
one of the big players in the manufacturing of networking and
communications chips and peripherals that brought in $2.2 billion in
sales in its fiscal 2007 ended this January of that year. (Marvell is
in the middle of a stock options review and has delayed its quarterly
filings for the past three quarters, and has grown smartly in the past
several years as wired and wireless PC connectivity has taken off in
the consumer and corporate PC markets.)
Marvell has its own chip design teams, and is a licensee of the ARM
RISC chip that was acquired by Digital Equipment and after many passes
around has ended up at Intel
as the XScale chip. Marvell's own ARM variant, called Feroceon in its
most recent incarnation, as well as Intel's XScale, which Marvell helps
Intel design, are used in all kinds of electronics--PDAs, printers,
cell phones, and so forth--where power consumption is a bigger issue
than raw performance, but where there has to be a baseline of
acceptable performance, too.
The old rule in the systems business is that you need a megabit of
network bandwidth for every megahertz of processor clock speed to have
a balanced interaction between processors and network interfaces.
Processors have hit a wall at around 3 GHz (excepting IBM's forthcoming
Power6 chip, which will scale from 3.5 GHz to 5 GHz), but network
interface cards are already heading toward 10 gigabits and will soon be
running at 40 gigabits and soon thereafter at 100 gigabits. The
networks have a lot more bandwidth than the cycle time on a processor.
And that means you have to break the network interface up so it can
provide adequate bandwidth to each thread and core in a processor
through multiple direct memory access (DMA) channels. This, in short,
is what the Neptune chip does. Marvell is a chip maker as well as a
network interface supplier, and as part of its deal with Sun, the
server maker has not only licensed Neptune to Marvell for its own
products, but will also be a contractor to supply Sun with its own
networking cards.
"The Neptune chip is very big, specifically because it is a general
purpose device and not tied to any specific instruction set," Yen says.
While this is all interesting, the real task facing Yen, which I hinted
at in the Microelectronics group announcement two weeks ago, is to sort
out how Sun will fabricate its future processors and other chips. For
two decades, Texas Instruments
has been Sun's foundry for Sparc processors, but TI has announced that
it will stop creating new chip making processes and running chip
fabrication factories--going fabless, as they say in the industry--in
the 32 nanometer generation. TI, like Sun, can't afford to make the
investments necessary in the chip racket, and so TI is looking for a
fab partner for its digital signal processors and the other chips it
makes.
The Sun-TI partnership worked well for both companies because Sun
needed to have cutting-edge chip fabrication processes to get the
highest possible performance out of its generations of Sparc
processors. There was some dubs that got flubbed, to be sure, as always
happens in the chip business--the UltraSparc-III chips were late to
market in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Sun could least afford to
lose its performance edge, for instance. And TI needed chips to put its
most advanced chip-making processes through the paces before rolling it
out to high volume DSP chips.
The good news is that the work on 45 nanometer processes that Sun plans
to use and TI will implement is largely done, according to Yen. "We
certainly need to work on this issue," says Yen. "The 45 nanometer
generation is mostly done. The issue is more with the 32 nanometer
generation.
Fujitsu
was briefly a second source for UltraSparc-II chips back in the 1990s,
and has been late shipping the Sparc64 VI processor used in the shared
Advanced Product Line of Sparc-based servers that Sun and the various
incarnations of Fujitsu will announce next week. Yen says that
Fujitsu's fabs are relatively small, but that there are possibilities. Advanced Micro Devices could be a chip fab partner for Sun, of course, but AMD is a chip process partner with Sun's rival, IBM. And Sun is now readying servers using Intel's
Xeon processors and could cut a deal to have Intel fab its chips, as
Digital Equipment and HP did for some time. Yen listened to all of
these ideas and didn't shoot any of them down or endorse them.
"We need to take a lot into consideration. It is a complicated equation," says Yen.
Yen doesn't think there is much of a chance that the UltraSparc-IV or
Rock designs will be licensed, and he is not basing the
Microelectronics group's business plan on it. "If IBM or HP want to use
Rock, I am all ears," says Yen with a laugh. "And John Fowler, who runs
Sun's Systems group may not like it, but that is why the
Microelectronics group is independent." Yen does think that there is
the possibility that there can be lots of derivatives of the Niagara
design, aside from Sun's own future Niagara-2 and Niagara-3 chips.
Read the original article: http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn041107-story01.html
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