The Register's Timothy Prickett Morgan reports on a Sun generated roadmap for the SPARC processors that was purportedly produced in June for some of Sun's largest customers. Since Sun is in the midst of being acquired by Oracle, Morgan points out that readers should understand it is by no means the ultimate roadmap that Oracle will use to pilot the Sun server business once it has been acquired. It is, however, a hint at where Sun would expect the SPARC processors to develop and be released.

For a quick overview, the roadmap shows:

2009

• Jupiter+: 2.88 GHz, 1-64 sockets

The Jupiter+ chip is implemented in the same 65 nanometer process as the Jupiter chip was, and it is made by Fujitsu, a company that is in the process of outsourcing its chip manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, Morgan writes.

2010

• Rainbow Falls: 1.67 GHz, 1-4 sockets

This is the 16-core, SPARC T series processor. There have been discussions of a larger thread and socket count for these.

Late 2010 / Early 2011

• Jupiter-E: 3GHz, 1-64 sockets

The Sun SPARC Enterprise server lineup is anticipating a speed boost to 3 GHz with the Jupiter-E chips.

Late 2011

• Yosemite Falls: 2.5 GHz, 1-4 sockets

Presumably to be sold as the T4, Morgan writes that Sun is planning to implement a new core for the Niagara family, and it will backstep to eight cores with eight threads per core to boost clock speeds.

2012

• Fujitsu Advanced Product Line (APL) 2

According to Morgan, Sun has made no commitment to the APL 2 servers that are presumably to be based on the "Venus" eight-core Sparc64-VIII processor, which has a Sparc64-VIIIfx variant aimed at supercomputers. Morgan reports that the Sparc64-VIIIfx chip will be used in a 10 petaflops massively parallel machine being built by Fujitsu and paid for by the Japanese government under the 1.2bn Project Keisoku effort.

• Yellowstone Falls: 3 GHz, 4-192 sockets

Four cores and eight threads per core, this chip will be implemented in a 28 nanometer process.

• Cascade Falls: 3 GHz, 1-8 sockets

Sixteen cores and eight threads per core like the future Rainbow Falls T3 chips, but it can be used in machines with anywhere from 1 to 8 processor sockets.

Not on the roadmap is the 16-core "Rock" UltraSPARC-RK processor for Sun's proposed "Supernova" line of servers. Morgan notes that in early August, the tweaks for the Rock chips were removed from OpenSolaris, which referred to Rock as the UltraSPARC-AT10.

More Information

Sun's Sparc server roadmap revealed - The Register article

Sun's New Chip Designs [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter