Sun To Boost UltraSparc-IV Clock Speeds in Early February

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The word on the street is that Sun Microsystems is getting ready to boost the clock speed on the dual-core "Jaguar" UltraSparc-IV processors that it uses in its Sun Fire line of Unix servers. The kicker to the Jaguar chips, which is expected to be announced at Sun's Network Computing product launch on February 1, is meant to tide over Sparc shops until the "Panther" dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ chips are announced sometime in the middle of 2005, which usually means July or maybe even August in the computer biz.

The current Jaguar chips have two cores, just like IBM's Power4 and Power5 chips and Hewlett-Packard's PA-8900 chips. The Jaguar chips run 1.2 GHz currently and deliver about 80 to 85 percent more performance than a single core "Cheetah" UltraSparc-III processor. Sun has been vague about how fast it will push up the clocks on the Jaguar chips, but the odds favor somewhere between 1.35 GHz and 1.5 GHz.

This is a relatively minor boost in performance, but Sun can and does charge a premium for heavy configurations of its Sun Fire servers using the fastest chips it can deliver, which boosts both revenue and profit in a given quarter. These slightly faster processors may only be available for a small number of customers, but some shops need more oomph today and cannot wait until later in the year for the faster Panther chips.

The kicker to the Jaguar chip is something of a surprise based on what some Sun executives have said in the fall of 2004. In September, Andy Ingram, vice president of marketing for Processor and Network Products at Sun, said that the company would be introducing a kicker to the Jaguar chip in the May 2005 timeframe, and then the Panther chip in late 2005 or so. But a few weeks later, David Yen, who leads Sun's Sparc chip development efforts, told me that there would be no Jaguar kicker and that the Panther chip would be available in mid-2005. Whatever disagreements Sun's systems and chip people were having, it looks like Sun will be moving up shipments of faster Sparc chips and doing both the Jaguar UltraSparc-IV kicker and the Panther UltraSparc-IV+ chip.

Back in October, Yen said that it would take a few months to get the Panther chips across the Sun Fire server line. While Sun is probably hoping to push the Panther chips up to 1.8 GHz or even 2 GHz, Yen said that the company may get the chip out the door at lower clock speeds to start, perhaps at 1.6 GHz. The Panther chips will be built using a 90 nanometer copper/low-k chip process from Texas Instruments that also adds strained silicon to shrink transistor sizes even further than that copper/low-k process would allow. Generally speaking, the more you can shrink a circuit, the faster you can make it run. The Panther chip will 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. Sun will also 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.

Sun is also expected to debut faster versions of its single-core UltraSparc-IIIi processors, which currently top out at 1.6 GHz. These faster UltraSparc-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. But then again, Sun could surprise us.