Sun Kills Rock CPU, Says NYT Report

BBCWatcher writes "Despite Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent statement that his company will continue Sun's hardware business, it won't be with Sun processors (and associated engineering jobs). The New York Times reports that Sun has canceled its long-delayed Rock processor, the next generation SPARC CPU. Instead, the Times says Sun/Oracle will have to rely on Fujitsu for SPARCs (and Intel otherwise). Unfortunately Fujitsu is decreasing its R&D budget and is unprofitable at present. Sun's cancellation of Rock comes just after Intel announced yet another delay for Tukwila, the next generation Itanium, now pushed to 2010. HP is the sole major Itanium vendor. Primary beneficiaries of this CPU turmoil: IBM and Intel's Nehalem X86 CPU business."

Comments

Re:More likely reason

[TheRaven64]

The Rock is an amazing chip on paper. It runs an extra fetch/decode part of the pipeline a few cycles ahead so that it is always loading the needed data into the cache before it's needed.

If this technology doesn't work, however, Rock is a pretty unimpressive chip and there is no evidence that it does actually work (for example, it doesn't predict across computed jumps, which accounts for a lot of cache misses in current chips). Even if it does work, Rock looked like it would perform best on the kind of workloads where the T2 does well, but probably not as well as the T2. Out of the SPARC64 series, Rock, and the T2 and successors, Rock is by far the weakest. The SPARC64 does well on traditional workloads, the T2 on heavily-parallel workloads. Between the two, Sun already has processors for pretty much any market they want to be in - Rock just doesn't fit commercially. Note that the summary's comment, there is no indication that they are killing off the Niagara line - they aren't exiting the CPU business, just killing one failed experiment. Not the first, and probably not the last, time Sun has killed off an almost-finished CPU because there was no market for it.

The summary is misleading....

[paulsnx2]

Rock was Sun's effort to develop a processor with high single thread performance. Single thread performance doesn't help the database performance of Sun' s new Oracle Over Lords. What databases need is high multi-thread performance.

The Niagara line ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 ) provides the proper architecture for improving database performance, and this effort by Sun has the added benefit of actually producing shipping products (Unlike Rock).

At this time, Oracle/Sun has NOT announced the killing off of further Niagara development.

Re:What are these architectures good for...

[downix]

Scale. x86 cannot scale up anywhere near as far as SPARC (or even MIPS for that matter) can. You realize that the cheapest SPARC can handle more threads per cycle than a dual-quad Xeon, and do it while using less electricity, right? As for the big-iron chips, they handle databases on a scale that dwarfs the address range of x86, relying on more registers than even exists in the x86 architecture.

Re:What are these architectures good for...

[John Betonschaar]

Yes, and all these threads you get have access to crappy fpu's and horrible memory bandwith.

It's true that you can easily slap a lot of Sparc CPU's into a single machine than you can do so with x86, but since you're actually going to need all those CPU's to match even an off-the-shelf dual quad-core Opteron system for most tasks, the end result is that you're still spending much, much more money and probably suck more power too. For tasks that cannot be parallelized or executed concurrently Sparc is rubbish in every aspect imaginable.

I work at one of those companies that got lured into standardizing on Sparc hardware years ago, and now we're kind of stuck on it because we have all those systems in the field, with customers. A while ago we investigated upgrading to newer Sparc hardware (M3000) and we leased a test system to assess it's performance. For compationally intensive (FPU) tasks running 8-threads, the ~$11,000 Sparc64 IV with 8 cores / 16 hardware threads was about as fast as a $400 Core 2 Duo laptop. I'm not kidding....

So unless you want to run an enterprise database that has to handle 1000s of requests a second, Sparc has zero added value. If you really need a Sparc system for high-load, high-availability server tasks, I don't know. I'd guess a Power6 server or a rack of Opterons or Xeons wouldn't do much worse.

Re:What are these architectures good for...

[afabbro]

What you say is often, but not exclusively, true. The main reason people buy SPARC:

• The CoolThreads servers are genuinely different than others. Radically low power consumption and a bajillion threads. That doesn't mean they're good for everything, but in the app space they're marketed for, they're exceptional.
• If I have millions of lines of code written for Solaris on SPARC, I might want to run SPARC. Sun has a large presence in many markets and compatibility (left over from the days when x86 was nowhere near SPARC) is important.
• Above a certain level, x86 can't compete. You can say "yet" if you want. Sun, IBM, etc.'s high-end gear is the closest you can get to a mainframe, in terms of RAIDed memory (one bad chip doesn't bring down the system), hot-swapping CPUs, hardware partitioning, etc. There are a lot of people in love with clustered x86 boxes, but they do not scale as well. A single box with 32 CPUs will perform better than 16 boxes with 2 CPUs, every single time. The 16x2 might be cheaper, but there are a lot of apps that don't run as well that way. To take a very common example, Oracle RAC scales about as well as anything on "wide and small commodity," but Oracle certainly runs better on a 32-CPU box rather than 16x2.

I agree that in many cases, proprietary kit is overpriced and unnecessary. Which is why it's on the decline...

This Was Always Going to Happen

[segedunum]

As soon as a group of people got into Sun, looked at the costs of maintaining and pumping research and development into their hardware, looked at the relative performance from SPARC versus competitors using x86 and ultimately looked at the bottom line objectively without being stupidly protectionist, then the next step was going to be shutting down Sun's production of Rock and SPARC and moving it to Fujitsu as a supplier to save money. However, even that probably won't be enough as I'm not sure Fujitsu will be able to keep SPARC viable themselves. SPARC has had two, possibly three, options written on the wall for the past ten years:

1. Catch up to x86 platforms in terms of raw performance as most SPARC systems have tended to overlap with workloads x86 systems have taken over. Papering over cracks by promoting 'CoolThreads' and parallel processing as a way around this performance gap was never going to work. I can remember almost ten years ago working somewhere where a person discovered that their Athlon 1.4GHz desktop system had several times the performance of their UltraSPARC III server and could complete tasks several times sooner. Cue lots of panic as UltraSPARC was justified because it was 'enterprise' reliable.

2. Accept the inevitable and throw the towel in.

3. The third way: Do what IBM has done with Power and push it into a high-end and high premium niche. This is difficult because IBM itself can only cover Power by selling mainframe packages and a whole bunch of add-ons to make it pay. Sun have had difficulty with this because their hardware division has always relied on hardware sales themselves.

Option 2 has clearly become the only way out once Sun's difficulties resulted in a takeover and as poor as Oracle might be at some things they are extremely successful at judging bottom lines.

Re:What are these architectures good for...

[Macka]

Yeah, but the thing is that 32-CPU systems are incredibly niche. I've been involved in projects that delivered a number of systems of that size over the years and I can count on one hand the times they've been used as single 32-CPU systems. In virtually all cases they were hard partitioned down to 4, 8 and sometimes 16 cpu systems. And x86 is walking all over that market now. Next year when the Nehalem-EX chips ship, you'll get your 32 cores on a standard 4 socket server with twice as many threads. It just shoves the high end systems more and more into a tight corner. RAIDed memory is great, but that alone is not worth the premium that proprietary solutions are burdened with.