- The UltraSparc IV processor, due later this year, has two cores etched onto the same slice of silicon. The chip will slip into existing servers with UltraSparc III processors.
- A version of UltraSparc IV, code-named Gemini and designed for lower-end servers such as thin "blade" systems, is due in products to ship in 2004. Sun said earlier this month that blade servers with the dual-core UltraSparc processors should arrive in the first half of 2004. Gemini, like UltraSparc IV and the newest UltraSparc III, will be built using a 130-nanometer manufacturing process.
- The UltraSparc V processor, due in 2005, will have "five times the performance of processors we have today," Yen said, and will have better features for data protection and use in massive multiprocessor machines. The chip also will be able to perform a host of new operations, called the VIS Instruction Set 3. Where previous VIS extensions accelerated media operations such as encoding video, VIS 3 will speed more general applications such as encrypting data, said Michael Splain, chief technologist of Sun's processor group. UltraSparc V will be built on a 90 nanometer process. It will also feature the ability to switch between two different modes of operation: one designed for business computing jobs such as wrangling databases, the other for technical computing jobs such as modeling car crashes.
- The first chips based on Sun's Afara acquisition will arrive in 2005 and will be built on a 90 nanometer process. The chips, code-named Niagara, sacrifice sophisticated abilities to run one task fast in favour of a simpler design that runs many tasks, or threads, simultaneously -- a concept Sun calls "chip multi-threading" and that fits into its overall throughput computing plan. Niagara also will have high-level Ethernet networking and encryption capabilities built into silicon, Splain said. Each Niagara chip will have eight "cores" that can independently run four threads, with much of Sun's secret sauce being in the rules that determine which thread is active, Splain said.
- Sun will merge Niagara lineage with the UltraSparc lineage after 2005 in a processor 30 times faster than today's 1.2GHz UltraSparc III, Yen said. This new chip "will provide hardware features to do Java acceleration and will extensively utilise asynchronous circuitry," Yen said. Sun has been working for years on asynchronous chip designs in which different parts of a chip are governed by different clocks so the entire processor, with millions of transistors, doesn't have to march in lockstep.
Sun chief executive Scott McNealy was subdued at the conference on Monday but resumed some of his trademark style jabbing at competitors on Tuesday. One target was Intel's Itanium processor, codesigned by Hewlett-Packard. The Itanium design tries too hard to execute one thread quickly, a strategy that suffers diminishing returns and requires too much circuitry, McNealy and other Sun executives argued. "David Yen can beat Itanium. There's no question," McNealy said. Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos criticised Itanium's size and the fact that software written for widely used Pentium and Xeon chips has to be rewritten for Itanium. "They can't physically fit two Itanium cores on the same die (silicon chip) until 2005. They're way behind," Papadopoulos said. And Intel didn't learn lessons from Digital and Motorola, which changed the set of instructions their processors understood when moving from VAX to Alpha and from the 68000 designs to the PowerPC designs, respectively. McNealy also disparaged Hewlett-Packard for deciding to move away from its own PA-RISC processors. "PA is a pretty interesting architecture, and we're glad they put a fork in it," McNealy said. Sun has no regrets that it relies on Texas Instruments to build its microprocessors -- especially as the transition to larger, 300mm silicon wafers puts more pressure on chipmakers to fill their factory capacity. At the same time, the company said Texas Instruments isn't an exclusive partner. "We're going to go out and buy best-of-breed silicon technology from a variety of sources," Splain added.
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