As Sun has been saying for over a year now, its 16-core Rock server chip is expected to hit the marketplace in the second half of 2009 with delivery coming sometime this fall. John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun, said in an interview with IDG's Agam Shah, "The processor is in various stages of debug. We're getting close [to release]."

An exact ship date wasn't identified by Fowler, but he did suggest a September to November timeframe.

Sporting a new, multi-threaded design, the Rock will be offering double the core count from the UltraSPARC T2, which is Sun's fastest server processor to date with eight cores. The Rock's processor cores will operate at 2.1GHz.

Fowler said the first 16-core chips will go into midrange servers, debuting in a system "above" its current Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server that is powered by the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor.

"They are not going to be necessarily someone's first purchase," Fowler told Shah, "but they'll fit nicely into the midrange where a lot of enterprise-level databases and fairly significant amounts of processing will live."

Pund-IT Principal Analyst Charles King told Shah that Sun's new chip may build on the power efficiency and performance improvements the company delivered in its earlier UltraSPARC T2 processors. And although the Rock will be released during a recession, "By the time Rock appears, Sun enterprise customers are going to be hungry for something new. Whether they will be willing to make that investment in anyone's guess," King commented.

To take advantage of multicore and multithreaded processors, Sun is working on its software so that it can optimize core increases. Fowler told Shah that MySQL is being prepared to perform faster by breaking up instances of the application over multiple cores. "We're working on MySQL to make it scale to higher and higher thread and core counts," he said.

Although some recent studies have raised questions about whether a high number of cores will provide a jump in software performance, Fowler notes that the specifics are bit more complex.

"You have got to be careful of those very broad-based statements because all software is very different, and even a workload on a database can be different," he said. Some workloads perform "really well" on a higher number of cores, while others are better suited to four or eight cores, Fowler said.

More Information

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