|
"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.
Sun Microsystems Inc. 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 US$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 Corp. and, coming later this year,
from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Azul Systems Inc., 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.webwereld.nl/articles/46224/sun-s-rock-rolls-further-along.html
|
Get Informed 
