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

More likely reason

[downix]

It is more likely that Sun compared the Rock to Fuji's new SPARC CPU and realized that it could not compare for the price/performance. Frankly, looking at the two, Sun made the wise move, killed off a weaker chip, and will likely push forward the SPARC64 VVIfx, which is further along in development and will be ready sooner.

Re:More likely reason

[TheRaven64]

I was at a talk by a former Intel chief architect a while ago which explained this. It takes an absolute minimum of about five years to get a new CPU to market. When you start, you have to make guesses about the kind of workload people will be running, their power and financial budgets, and the process technology that will be available to you for producing it. Once you've made these guesses, you can generally come up with a chip that meets the requirements.

The Pentium 4 is the canonical example of a chip made with bad guesses. The P4 team were told to make it fast at all speed. They missed the market, because they didn't notice that people were starting to care about power consumption, and few people wanted a 120W CPU - especially not in the data centre where the margins are high, but power and cooling are expensive. They also made some bad guesses about process technology, thinking that the process guys would fix the leakage problem so they could ramp the clock speeds up to 10GHz. They came up with a design that scaled up to 10GHz, but needed a process technology that still doesn't quite exist to produce it at these speeds.

I suspect something similar happened with Sun. First, they made some bad guesses about how well the thread scout would work. It's a nice idea on paper, but doesn't seem to perform well. The result is that Rock will perform better than other approaches on highly-deterministic CPU-bound workloads with lots of threads, while in the real world highly-parallel workloads tend to be I/O bound or have less predictable code flow.

The T2 goes in completely the opposite direction. It contains a set of very simple cores. They omit most of the complex logic found in other processors, and instead just have a lot of execution engines. If you have a workload that contains a lot of I/O-bound threads, then the T2 gives insanely good performance (both per Watt and per dollar). Sun began designing this family of chips right at the peak of the .com boom, and they are perfectly suited to web-serving workloads (they also do well on a lot of database workloads, which is one of the reasons Oracle is interested in them).

One of the things Sun does very well is recycle technology. There are a lot of half-dead projects at Sun that are not commercially exploited, but have fed ideas into their other products. Even though Rock is dead, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of their ideas appear in the T3 or T4. The hardware scout is only useful on a few workloads, but it's relatively easy to implement on something like the T2, so we may see it reappear in a future design.

Wow, there's not much left then.

[seeker_1us]

According to the CNET article, Tukwilla is pushed until 2010, and it's going to be 65nm instead of 45 nm. Since Intel has already demonstrated 32nm chips, that means Tukwilla will already be at least two generations behind when it's released. No new chip designs from Sun and Fujitsu decreasing the R&D budget. Sounds like this market is falling behind.

Re:What are these architectures good for...

[lewiscr]

Several years ago, I had the opposite problem with a real world OLTP load. I replaced a 5 year old Quad SparcII 450MHz machine with a Dual Opteron 2.4GHz. The Opterons had 3x the total MHz, 4x the RAM, more PCI bandwidth, and faster disks. They were half the price of the Sparc relacements, so I was not allowed to evalate the Sparc options. I guestimated that the new Sparc option would have been 2x faster and handled 4x the transactions compared to the 5 year old machines.

The Opterons were slight faster, but did not handle load spikes nearly as well. Had I been allowed to purchase the 5 year old hardware used, I probably would have been better off sticking with the 5 year old hardware. If I allow hindsight, including all the architecture conversion problems and software upgrade issues I had, the old-but-tested hardware would have been a big win. (Note: I had the ability to scale my database horitzontally very easily, so old machines were still useful machines.)

For a database server, I highly recommend that a Sparc based machine be evaulated next to any X86 based machine. They cost more upfront, but I found them to be cheaper in the long run.