So, it’s April 2007 and Sun Microsystems has just popped one of its 16-core Rock chips on CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s desk. Schwartz posted pictures of the Rock silicon on his blog, bragging that ‘the chips are running billions of instructions already’. Sun’s customers must be encouraged by the Rock display, having suffered from about five years of delayed UltraSPARC chips. Servers based on the Rock family – Boulder and Pebble – should begin shipping in 2008.
Sorry but the pictures are just the package top & bottom, still the pin counts are really getting up there, 2500 pins or so, mostly power, 800+ signals.
I’d like to see some high quality png die shots, I collect them as a fellow chip guy.
Nice Rock you’ve got there
Too bad I won’t get my hands on one
I’ll have to wait until 16 cores are all the rage in last years x86.
Is this related to Niagra at all?
Of course,
this is the next member of the UltraSPARC family and should be sold officially as UltraSPARC T2 (the official name for the Niagara is UltraSPARC T1).
this is the next member of the UltraSPARC family and should be sold officially as UltraSPARC T2 (the official name for the Niagara is UltraSPARC T1)
Actually, no, Rock and the T2 are two separate designs. The T2 is an 8 core, 8 thread per core design strongly based on the T1 but with lots of upgrades and neat features like 10G ethernet controllers on-die. Most importantly; the T2 is a one-socket only design as far as I know, that is, it is for smaller systems.
Rock is 16 cores, likely less than 8 threads per core, and will support multi-socket designs.
Plus Rock is going to have some new features for out of sync operation.
The other big difference is the Rock is built to be a general purpose hi performance chip, where as the Tx chips are more specialized for throughput (web servers, db server, etc..)
Thanks for the enlightenment
i think there will be a two socket T2 code named Victoria falls or stg..
Ummm…. wonder if this means that were going to see ‘rock solid’ servers advertised.