On May 2, the Santa Clara, Calif., company is announcing that its new UltraSPARC multicore processor, called Rock, successfully booted Sun's own Solaris 10 operating system for the first time.
"This is the most complex thing we have ever built at
Sun," said Jeff Thomas, senior vice president for engineering and
microelectronics at Sun. "This test showed that we were able to get the
operating
system
up and running and all the basics are there. After this, we'll be
running some additional diagnostic tests and test other applications in
order to validate what we have done."
On April 10, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote on his company blog
that Sun had just received the first Rock silicon back from Texas
Instruments. Not long after that, the company began its first tests of
the 16-core processor, including the successful boot of the Solaris OS.
By comparison, the current crop of Sun's UltraSPARC
processors, which also go by the name "Niagara," offer eight cores per
chip. The UltraSPARC T1, which Sun sells in its SunFire T1000 and T2000
servers,
offers four threads per core. The soon-to-be-released Niagara 2
processor doubles the threading, offering eight threads per core.
Niagara 2 is expected to hit the market later this year.
Click here to read about an April 17 agreement between Sun and Fujitsu.
For several years, Sun has been one of the biggest
proponents of processors with CMT (chip multithreading) architecture.
This key feature allows the CPU to run multiple threads in parallel,
which provides higher throughput for multithread applications.
Executives have said that Rock with its CMT
architecture will offer vast improvement in high-end enterprise
applications, such as CRM (customer relationship
management), and offer support for large databases.
So far, Sun executives have not offered additional
details on how Rock will improve on its Niagara processors. Fadi
Azhari, director of marketing for SPARC, said the company is not ready
to detail how many threads per core Rock will offer. He also declined
to offer any other specific performance benchmarks.
Sun executives did note that Rock, which has been
subject to past delays, will begin to appear in servers starting in the
second half of 2008. Azhari added that Sun is working on several
systems that will support the new chip.
Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Research, said Sun
is following the lead of several other IT companies, notably Microsoft
in its run up to the release of its Windows Vista operating system, by
offering incremental information about a new product without diving too
deeply into configuration and performance details.
"People have been talking about Rock for a long time
now, and the company has been fairly conservative about its estimates
and when it would arrive," King said. "It seems now that things are
moving along and this is legitimate progress. The fact that they were
able to boot Solaris is a good reason to generate a press release and
let people know that it's on the way."
Read the original article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2124619,00.asp?kc=EWEWEMNL050207EP40E
Get Informed 
