Sun, Fujitsu Ready APL Sparc-Based Systems for Launch

Published: April 12, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The invitations have been sent, and the Grand Hyatt hotel adjacent to New York's Grand Central Station has been booked for the event next Tuesday morning. After long last, server makers Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu will launch their co-developed, Sparc-compatible line of servers that have been created under the boring moniker Advanced Product Line.

John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's Systems group, and Chiaki Ito, senior vice president at Fujitsu, will be at the launch event in the Big Apple.

The APL products make good on promises that Sun and Fujitsu made to create a joint product line based on Sun's "Niagara" Sparc T1 processors and Fujitsu's "Olympus-C" Sparc64 VI processors, the first dual-core variants of the Sparc architecture created by Fujitsu. Way back when, in 2003 before Sun and Fujitsu announced their partnership during a time when Sun's own UltraSparc processors had fallen way behind IBM's Power4 processors and were about to fall behind Intel's Itanium chips, Fujitsu had planned to get the dual-core Sparc64 VI chips out in mid-2004 and the kicker quad-core Sparc64 VII chips out in early 2006. If the Sun-Fujitsu partnership provided some cover for Sun, it seems to have also provided some cover for Fujitsu, which had its own problems with Sparc chips, apparently.

Back in June 2004, at the announcement of the partnership, the two companies said they hoped to get the APL products using the dual-core Sparc64 VI chips, to market by mid-2006, which is an extra two years of development based on the original 2003 roadmaps. As it is, these products will come to market almost three years later than originally expected, and thus far, Fujitsu has been tight lipped about why.

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