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Servers based on Sun Microsystems' Rock processor will now arrive in the second half of 2009, The Register can confirm.
Last Dec.,
we reported on speculation that Rock had suffered a delay, shifting to
2009 from its late 2008 original delivery forecast. Now one of Sun's
top engineers Marc Tremblay has confirmed the "second half of
2009" date for systems delivery, during an interview here at the
International Solid State Circuits Conference. Sun had looked to spook
rivals Intel and IBM with its much-ballyhooed 16-core chip but will now
trail at least Intel with a major high-end processor refresh.
Servers based on Sun Microsystems' Rock processor will now arrive in the second half of 2009, The Register can confirm.
Last Dec.,
we reported on speculation that Rock had suffered a delay, shifting to
2009 from its late 2008 original delivery forecast. Now one of Sun's
top engineers Marc Tremblay has confirmed the "second half of
2009" date for systems delivery, during an interview here at the
International Solid State Circuits Conference. Sun had looked to spook
rivals Intel and IBM with its much-ballyhooed 16-core chip but will now
trail at least Intel with a major high-end processor refresh.
According to Tremblay, the "innovation in the processor required
more than expected testing and certification." He and others have
billed Rock as a major, major advance in high-end processor design. The
processor has 16 cores, can tap immense amounts of memory and employs a
number of aggressive pre-fetching and out of order software/hardware
techniques.
During ISSCC, Tremblay disclosed a 2.3GHz target speed for the 410m
transistor chip, which Sun expects to consume 249 watts and boast
680Gb/s of memory I/O bandwidth.
Had Sun shipped Rock on time, it would have matched up well against
Intel, which plans to release a revamped version of Itanium at the end
of this year. Now Sun looks to end up about a year behind Intel-based
vendors with much improved silicon and a year ahead (or less) of IBM's
Power7 release.
Read the original article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/04/sun_rock_2009/
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