Sun puts 16 cores on high-end Rock processor
Sun Microsystems, already an aggressive advocate of multicore processing, will try to stay a step ahead of the game by putting 16 cores in its high-end Rock chip. With overheating capping chip speeds, chipmakers have been scrambling to improve performance instead by packing multiple processing engines onto a single slice of silicon. Sun got an early start with its UltraSparc T1 “Niagara” processor, which has eight cores, and it looks like Rock will keep the company a step ahead of the competition.
Rock will have 16 cores, John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun’s systems business, said in an interview Thursday. Rock-based servers, due to arrive in servers in 2008, will likely come as competitors’ chips have at most eight cores, analysts say. Boosting performance is crucial to Sun’s attempt to reverse the diminished influence and use of its Sparc family of processors, which have lost share to mainstream x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and to rivals such as IBM’s Power family.
Comments are closed.