The computer maker got that ball rolling with its UltraSparc IV chip, a dual-core processor that came out in March and now ships in about 50 percent of Sun's high-end Sun Fire servers, according to Sun executives who spoke at an informal press briefing Friday afternoon.
Sun plans to offer the UltraSparc IV chip, which had been reserved for high-end Sun Fire servers, in new four- and eight-processor Sun Fire servers this month. Right now the company's Sun Fire v480 and v880 offer four and eight UltraSparc III chips and start at about $20,000 (£11,0000) and $33,000, respectively. But adding the UltraSparc IV chips, each of which can handle two simultaneous threads, or streams of data, will boost their performance by about 50 percent, said Andy Ingram, vice president of marketing for Sun's Scalable Systems Group. Thus, the new four-processor Sun Fire server will perform like a Sun Fire v880 with eight-processors but offer roughly the same cost and footprint of the current four-processor machines.
"It's safe to say that... what you'll get with the upgrade is the footprint and cost of a four-way (server) and the throughput of an 8-way system," he said.
Sun, which made public a few additional details on the forthcoming chips on Friday, aims to amplify that example with its future processors, all of which include multiple cores and capabilities to handle many more threads. The beleaguered company is hoping to percolate higher-performance throughout its server line as it looks to return to steady profitability and compete with the likes of fellow system builders, including IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
UltraSparc IV and its descendant, the UltraSparc IV+, due next year, will be the first in the series of new processor offerings, which Sun plans to deliver over the next four years. The company will first boost the clock speed of the UltraSparc IV before moving to a new 90-nanometer design for UltraSparc IV+ next year. The collective improvements are expected to double the chip's performance, Ingram said. Then, during 2006, Sun will bring out two new processors, another dual-core, dubbed Olympus, and a multicore chip capable of handling 32-threads, called Niagara. Rock, designed to be a high-end chip for speeding up applications such as databases, will arrive in 2008, Ingram said.
It wasn't an easy road to Olympus, though. Sun, which has been grappling with three years of revenue declines and several rounds of layoffs -- although it posted a fiscal fourth quarter profit in July -- cancelled its UltraSparc V project to work with Fujitsu on Olympus.
