Sun successfully boots Solaris on "Rock" processor

By Bridget Botelho, News Writer 02 May 2007 | SearchDataCenter.com

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Sun Microsystems, Inc., today announced it has successfully booted the Solaris 10 operating system (OS) on its high-end "ROCK" SPARC processor for the first time.

More on UltraSPARC-based servers: Sun chips away at UltraSPARC server line Sun and Fujitsu join to deliver new Unix servers  Ubuntu open source OS available on Sun Sparc servers

This announcement comes within six weeks of Sun receiving its first shipment of prototype ROCK processors.

Booting Solaris for the first time is considered a critical accomplishment in the development of Sun's high-end, chip multithreading (CMT) technology. These chips are being developed to bring excellent throughput to high-end enterprise applications like ERP, CRM and large databases, reports David Yen, executive vice president for Sun Microelectronics.

This should keep Sun on track to ship their first systems based on ROCK in the second half of 2008, according to Yen.

The ROCK processor is a hexadeca-core (16-core) UltraSPARC implementation for single-threaded and multithreaded high-end applications.

ROCK represents Sun's third generation of CMT processors, following the UltraSPARC T1 and upcoming Niagara 2 processors. UltraSPARC T1 -- with up to eight cores and four threads per core -- is currently available in the SunFire T1000, T2000 and SPARC Enterprise systems, Sun reports.

Systems based on the Niagara 2 processor are slated to become available in the second half of calendar 2007. The Niagara 2 processor will have up to eight threads per core and combines all major server functions on the processor itself, making it Sun's first "system on a chip." Niagara 2-based systems are expected to deliver twice the throughput of existing T1000 and T2000 systems.

Let us know what you think about the story; e-mail: Bridget Botelho, News Writer.

Tags: Sun Solaris Unix and Sparc server platforms,  VIEW ALL TAGS

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