Speculation on whether Sun will be releasing a kicker to its dual-core Jaguar UltraSPARCTM IV processors at its next product launch has customers anxiously awaiting the February 1, 2005 event. If released, this faster Jaguar chip will proceed the availability of the Panther chips in the Sun FireTM product line by approximately six months.

Expectations are for an updated Jaguar chip to be boosted in speed and run between 1.35 GHz and 1.5 GHz, reported Timothy Prickett Morgan for The UNIXR Guardian. The current Jaguar chips run at 1.2 GHz, delivering approximately 85 percent more performance than single core UltraSPARCTM III processors.

It should be noted that David Yen, executive vice president, Scalable Systems Group at Sun, said this kicker for the Jaguar processors may not even make it to market; although Andy Ingram, vice president, Marketing, Scalable Systems Group at Sun, told Prickett Morgan in a September 2004 interview that Sun was working on it.

Jaguar chips are used in the Sun Fire server product line. Although this anticipated boost in speed is minimal, Prickett Morgan writes that some customers may want this increased speed immediately instead of waiting for the scheduled release of the Panther chips in mid-2005.

Yen said that it would take a few months to get the Panther chips across the Sun Fire server line. Yen mentioned that initially the Panther processors may be released at clock speeds of 1.6 GHz, but reportedly, Sun is hoping to push the Panther chips up to 1.8 GHz and possibly 2 GHz.

The Panther chips will be built using a 90 nanometer copper/low-k chip process from Texas Instruments. These processors are expected to have an on-chip L2 cache with a 2 MB capacity, which should also help boost system performance considerably compared to the 16 MB external L2 caches used in the Jaguar chips.

Prickett Morgan reported that Sun will add an external, 32 MB L3 cache with the Panthers, and will expand chip buffers, provide better branch prediction and improve prefetch algorithms to further boost performance. "When you add it all up, Sun is expecting a Panther-based system to be able to do about twice as much work as a Jaguar-based system with 1.2 GHz processors," he writes.

Faster versions of Sun's single-core UltraSPARCTM IIIi processors, which currently top out at 1.6 GHz, are expected to be released from Sun. These faster UltraSPARCTM IIIi+ chips, also enabled by the move to the 90 nanometer processes from 130 nanometer processes currently used in the UltraSPARC chip lines, may not appear until mid-2005 or later. [...read more...]

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