Sneak Peek At Sun's SPARC Server Roadmap

The folks at The Register have gotten their hands on Sun's confidential roadmap from June, which outlines the company's plans for SPARC product lines. The chart has some basic technical details for the UltraSPARC T-series and the SPARC64 line. The long-anticipated "Rock" line is not mentioned. "We can expect a goosed SPARC64-VII+ chip any day now, which will run at 2.88 GHz and which will be a four-core, eight-threaded chip like its 'Jupiter' predecessor. This Jupiter+ chip is implemented in the same 65 nanometer process as the Jupiter chip was, and it is made by Fujitsu, a company that is in the process of outsourcing its chip manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. ... not only has Sun cut back on the threads with [the 2010 UltraSPARC model, codenamed Rainbow Falls], it has also cut back on the socket count, keeping it at the same four sockets used by the T5440 server. And instead of hitting something close to 2 GHz as it should be able to do as it shifts from a 65 nanometer to a 45 nanometer process in the middle of 2010, Sun is only telling customers that it can boost clock speeds to 1.67 GHz with Rainbow Falls."

Comments

Peak???

[hguorbray]

I know this is a dark age for literacy, but s/b peek -ya know? like PEEK and POKE???

I'm just sayin'

Re:Just Give It Up Now

[Daniel Phillips]

Sun, if this is the best you can do -- 4 cores, 8 threads, arriving at 45nm just as everyone else is getting to 32nm

Sun's performance as a chip vendor is far better that your performance as a Slashdot troll. According to Sun's roadmap, a 16 core times 8 threads processor (128 threads just to be clear) at 40 nanometers arrives in 2010. That would be four sockets per blade, 48 blades per chassis for a respectable 768 multithreaded processors per chassis. As Sun says, it comes down to the TPC-C numbers. I'm no Sun fanboi, far from it, but I could be convinced by the right performance/heat ratio.

it has throughput and power efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

But why? 10 years ago I thought sharing an 8 CPU Sun with a big devel team was a privilege. Now any decent Dell workstation has that. What does SPARC have over Intel? (No vague claims of superior "throughput", please!)

It has throughput. Back in 2006, when the first T2000 was released, a dual Xeon could handle 980 req/s from Apache and the T2000 could handle 15,000 req/s:

                http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2006/03/23/niagara-vs-ftpheanetie-showdown/
                http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2006/03/27/niagara-benchmarks-update/

At the same time the Xeon used a peak of 2.2 Amps, while the T2000 peaked at 1.2 A. Things have only gotten faster.

Throw-in on-board crypto, and you can do AES-128 at 38.9 Gb/s with a single socket (eight core) T5220:

                http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/ultra_fast_cryptography_on_the

A T5440 can do 22,932 MB/s (183,456 Mb/s = 179 Gb/s):

                http://blogs.sun.com/yenduri/entry/t5440_crypto_performance_numbers

If you're a site that cares about SSL/TLS, how many x86 machines would need to buy, maintain, and cool to handle that load? How many F5 load balancers/SSL accelarators would you purchase? According to F5's own data sheet, the 8900 (with dual 850W P/S) can handle 9.6 Gb/s--and you still have to buy web servers on top of that (more power)

So the T5120 can do roughly four times the raw encryption rate, uses dual 720 W P/S, and also do work as web servers. You're also using less rack space.

Let's also compare to AMD-based systems (which Sun also sells):

                http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/web2_0_consolidation_sun_sparc

Now the Niagara (UltraSPARC-Tx) CPU isn't good for every work load out there, but if it's highly parallel then it's something that you should be looking.