Sun Boots Solaris on 16-Core "ROCK" Microprocessor

Sun Microsystems successfully booted its Solaris 10 OS on its high-end hexadeca-core (16-core) "ROCK" SPARC processor for the first time.



"Booting Solaris for the first time is a critical accomplishment in the development of our high-end, chip multithreading (CMT) technology," said David Yen, executive vice president for Sun Microelectronics. "This keeps us on track to ship our first systems based on ROCK in the second half of 2008. These systems will bring unprecedented throughput to high-end enterprise applications -- like ERP, CRM and large databases -- and continue to keep Sun years ahead of the competition."



The ROCK processor is an UltraSPARC implementation being developed for both 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. 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.

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