| Rock Processor |
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| microprocessors | |
| sun microsystems hardware | |
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Rock is a Multithreading , Multicore , SPARC -family Microprocessor currently in development at Sun Microsystems . It is a separate development from the Niagara ( UltraSPARC T1 and T2 ) family. Rock aims at higher per-thread performance, higher floating-point performance, and greater SMP scalability than the Niagara family. The Rock processor targets traditional high-end data-facing workloads, such as back-end database servers, as well as floating-point intensive high-performance computing workloads, where the Niagara family targets network-facing workloads such as web servers. The Rock processor will implement 64-bit (v9) SPARC instruction set. Each Rock processor chip includes sixteen cores, with each core capable of running two threads simultaneously, yielding 32 threads per chip. Each core also has a floating point/graphics unit. Each group of four processing cores is expected to share 32KB of L1 instruction cache and 32KB of L1 data cache.1 Servers built with Rock will use FB-DIMM s which can be used to increase reliability, speed and density of memory systems. The Rock processor is planned for a 65nm manufacturing process.2 Sun expects to ship Server s with the Rock processor in 2008.3 4 Sun has publicly disclosed a feature in the Rock processor called " Hardware Scout ". Hardware Scout uses otherwise idle chip execution resources to perform prefetching during cache misses. 5 In March 2006, Marc Tremblay , Vice President and Chief Architect for Sun's Scalable Systems Group, gave a presentation at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on Thread-level Parallelism , Hardware Scouting, and Thread-level Speculation .6 These multithreading technologies are expected to be included in the Rock processor. In Jan 2007, Sun announced the Tape-out of Rock.7 In April 2007, Sun CEO Jonathan I. Schwartz blogged8 an image of a fabricated and BGA -packaged Rock chip, labeled UltraSparc RK, and disclosed that it can address 256 Terabyte s of virtual memory in a single system running Solaris . In May 2007, Sun announced the first silicon of Rock booting Solaris successfully.9 In August 2007, Sun confirmed that Rock will be the first production processor to support Transactional Memory . 10 SEE ALSO REFERENCES |
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