Rock will also be capable of 32-threads, but it will be geared more toward databases and applications that require more floating point or number crunching capability, he said. The 65-nanometer process will be used for Rock as well.
Sun faces stiff competition from the likes of IBM, whose high-end servers run on dual-core Power5 chips, and also Intel, which plans to deliver a dual-core Itanium chip in 2005.
Thus Sun aims to deliver chips that can handle more threads, boosting their performance for applications that its main customers use most often, including Web or application servers and applications such as databases, Ingram explained. Assuming the chips live up to expectations, Sun will be able to tout higher performance and at the same time potentially solve some other puzzles as well, including price for performance and power consumption.
Using more-powerful multicore chips could enable Sun to offer similar or greater performance with fewer chips in a given server. Although a multicore chip might consume more power, be harder to cool and cost more than a given single-core chip, the need for fewer multicore chips could offset all those factors, Ingram explained.
Indeed, although a single Rock chip might consume more power than another chip, it might take only one to replicate the performance of one of Sun's current Sun Fire E25K servers, which uses up to 72 UltraSparc IV chips, he said.
"By doing that, for a given physical investment of power, cooling, space and cost, I get more throughput," or performance, he said. "There's lots of room for innovation where we can increase performance and drive down cost and power and heat dissipation issues through system design. We have to be willing to take a risk and think differently."
Sun also sells a line of servers based on AMD's Opteron processor and another with Intel Xeon chips.
