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Sun Microsystems is reporting another step in the development of its 16-core Rock microprocessor after successfully booting up its own Solaris 10 operating system on a computer with Rock installed.
"The system came up and didn't burn the
part or didn't burn the board up," said Jeff Thomas, senior vice
president of engineering for Sun's newly created microelectronics unit.
Sun's high-end UltraSparc CMT processor is on schedule to ship in the second half of 2008
Sun Microsystems is reporting another step in the development of its 16-core Rock microprocessor after successfully booting up its own Solaris 10 operating system on a computer with Rock installed.
"The system came up and didn't burn the part or didn't burn the board up," said Jeff Thomas, senior vice president of engineering
for Sun's newly created microelectronics unit.
Running
Solaris 10 on a Rock microprocessor means Sun remains on schedule to
ship the high-end UltraSparc (for Scalable Processor Architecture) chip
multithreading (CMT) processor in the second half of 2008. Rock is to
be fabricated by Texas Instruments Inc.
"Bringing up the OS is a very key component to us feeling confident about the execution of our roadmap," said Fadi Azhari,
director of marketing for Sun's Sparc CMT technology.
Multithreading
refers to a chip design in which multiple streams of computer
instructions, or threads, can travel through a processor core
simultaneously. Sun intends to make Rock a 16-core processor, but
Thomas said the company isn't yet ready to say how many threads will be
able to run through each core.
The
Rock processor is the third in a line of CMT processors from Sun,
following the UltraSparc T1, codenamed Niagara, that Sun introduced in
2005 and the UltraSparc T2, or Niagara 2 , coming out in mid-2007.
UltraSparc T1 microprocessors power Sun's T1000, T2000 and Sparc
Enterprise systems, which have generated $100 million in revenue for
Sun each quarter.
The
Niagara and Rock processors are "aimed at different sweet spots in the
market," said Jean Bozman, a server industry analyst at IDC. The
Niagara line handles network traffic, such as with telephone carriers,
and some smaller database jobs, but Rock is intended to handle even
more work.
"With Rock, the idea is that this is going to be a data center machine. It's going to run a wider variety of workloads," Bozman
said.
Sun envisions Rock processors handling enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other
large-scale computing functions, said Thomas.
Sun
is one of several chip makers bringing multicore and multithreading
processors to market to generate more processing power than can be
achieved by simply making single-core processors run faster. They
include quad-core chips from Intel and, coming later this year, from
Advanced Micro Devices.
Azul
Systems, using a different approach, markets "pools" of compute
processing capacity with as many as 768 processor cores in one system.
It's designed for transaction-heavy workloads such as those running
Java software applications.
Sun recently created a separate unit to develop new microelectronics products for use in Sun products but also to potentially
license technology to other companies.
Thomas didn't rule out the possibility of at least some elements of Rock's technology someday being licensed to others.
"It doesn't necessarily mean we would do it," he said, "but if there were an interesting deal proposed to us, we would think
about it."
Read the original article: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/02/sun-rock-rolls-along_1.html
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