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Sun Microsystems is shining some new light on its "Rock" processor.
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.
Sun Microsystems is shining some new light on its "Rock" processor.
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.
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.physorg.com/news97329357.html
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