Sun Tapes Out Rock Sparc Chip, Gooses Clocks on Niagara Sparc T1

Published: January 18, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Sun Microsystems may be one of the biggest fans of the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices, but the company also has a relatively large and presumably very profitable business selling Sparc-based systems. For years, Sun has been talking up its future multicore "Rock" high-end processors, and for the past few quarters, it has actually been selling its "Niagara" Sparc T1 processors. Today, Sun will announce that it has completed the design on the Rock processors and has also boosted the speed on the Niagara chips.

Sun has been talking about its Sparc multicore chip efforts for years, and has seen some market traction at the low-end of the server market with its Niagara-based T1000 and T2000 servers, which have a sales run rate of more than $100 million a quarter these days. Sun is clearly hoping that its future Rock Sparc variant, which is aimed at much more high-end workloads than the infrastructure and modest database workloads that the single-socket, 32-thread Niagara chips can support, will vault it over the future Power6 and "Tukwila" Itanium processors from IBM and Intel, respectively. By doing so, Sun could substantially revive its enterprise server business, particularly if it can bring high performance, lots of vertical scalability, and low power consumption in a single package. For this, many corporations will pay a hefty premium. If Sun didn't believe this, it would have killed off the Sparc line entirely three years ago, not just killed off the "Millennium" UltraSparc-VI processor and moved the Rock design into its spot in the Sparc roadmap.

Sun is being a bit cagey about what exactly the Rock processor is. But in announcing that the chip design is completed and that the specifications for the manufacturing of the chips have been sent to its chip foundry partner, Texas Instruments, Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for the Sparc processor line at Sun, did confirm a few details about the Rock processor.

First of all, the chip will indeed have 16 processor cores in its full configuration, says Azhari. And as is the case with the Niagara chip, Sun will deliver variants with fewer cores based on the yields it gets from TI. If a chip has only four, eight, or 12 cores working properly, for example, the Rock chip will have electronics that will allow the bad cores to be deactivated and the good ones to be turned on and used. This way, a chip that would have been thrown into the garbage bin is now put into a server. Azhari would not confirm what core counts would be in these Rock derivatives, but four, eight, 12, and 16 cores seem to be logical options.

The rumor mill has been suggesting for a few months that a Rock processor code-named "Pebble" will be used in single-socket boxes, like the Niagara designs of today, and that another one code-named "Boulder" will have NUMA or SMP electronics that allow them to be lashed together into machines with two, four, or eight sockets in a single system image. Azhari would not confirm these details of the future Rock-based servers, but if this is true, then the future "Supernova" servers from Sun will bring to bear a lot of threads in a very modest box in terms of socket count. Each Rock core is expected to have two processing threads and its own floating point unit, which means an eight-socket box would have 256 thread--about the upper limit that an operating system can handle these days.

Sun has said for years that the Rock chip will use a 65 nanometer process from TI, which means it should be able to deliver at least a 50 percent boost in clock speed over the current UltraSparc-IV+ processors, which top out at 1.6 GHz today and which were designed to hit 1.8 GHz and higher. So it is a good guess that this Rock chip could, in theory, run at 3 GHz or so. This is lower than the clock speed of current top-end Xeon DP processors from Intel and in the same ballpark as Opteron Rev F processors from AMD.

Sun has made no specific promises about performance, other than to say that Rock was designed to be 30 times more powerful than the UltraSparc-III processor running at 1.2 GHz in what it called "data throughput." Sun was never clear if this was a processor-based performance metric or a system-level performance metric. In fact, before the chip was called Rock, it was called 30X. (Maybe Sun could do a tie-in with NBC Studios and rename the chip 30 Rock?)

Presentations by David Yen from last year, who used to run Sun's chip operations and who now runs Sun's storage business, indicated that the Rock was rated at a relative data throughput performance of 30 compared to the current UltraSparc-IV+ being rated at 3.5. That would imply a factor of 8.6 performance improvement from the UltraSparc-IV+ processors used in the current Sparc-based Sun Fire servers. The magnitude of that number suggests that the 30X promise is a system-level performance comparison. And if that turns out to be a correct interpretation of what Sun is talking about, then the top-end Supernova servers are going to be very powerful boxes, indeed. All Azhari would say is that the performance boost expected from these boxes would be "orders of magnitude" higher than current Sparc boxes.

Having just taped out on January 3--a few days late, which meant that Sun's engineers had to wear suits to the office for every day they were late--Rock is scheduled to be ready to put into systems in the second half of 2008, says Azhari. A joint product line based on Fujitsu's quad-core Sparc64 VI "Olympus-C" and "Jupiter" server platforms will have about twice the performance of the top-end UltraSparc-IV+ systems currently shipping. This product line, also called the Advanced Product Line by Sun and Fujitsu, was expected to start shipping at the end of last year and is apparently gearing up for an early 2007 launch.

Sun still needs to build up its Niagara server business, regardless of APL systems and Supernova machines the latter of which are expected to appear in the summer or fall of 2008. And so, it is doubling the main memory on the Niagara servers and boosting the top-end clock speed of the Niagara chip from 1.2 GHz to 1.4 GHz. That small change in clock speed plus the doubling of memory to 64 GB (made possible by using denser memory DIMMs) can result in performance increases of 20 to 30 percent on some workloads, according to Azhari. The fatter memory modules are also available for customers who already have acquired T1000 and T2000 servers, too. Azhari says that Sun is charging about the same price for the T1000 and T2000 machines with the 1.4 GHz Niagara chips as it did for the 1.2 GHz versions. Exact pricing was not available at press time.

RELATED STORIES

The X Factor: High-End Chips Draw Even, Vendors Prepare to Differentiate

Sun Merges Server Units, Taps Key Exec for Storage

Sun Finally Announces Niagara-Based Sparc Servers

Sun Firms Up Its Sparc Chip Plans

Sun Allies with Fujitsu for Future Joint Sparc Platform

Sun Pulls the Plug on Future Millennium, Gemini Chips

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot