Sneak Peek At Sun's SPARC Server Roadmap 113
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."
Overcome by events (Score:2, Insightful)
The only things on Sun's roadmap now are signs to the effect of "Road Closed 1000 feet".
Re:And costs are astronomically solar. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google goes for the lowest watt per processing, the actual hardware cost is probably negligible compared to the cost of years of electricity for powering the systems and cooling the surroundings.
Re:Overcome by events (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that's looking more true every day. I remember running a network of Sparcs and bragging to my family members about how they (the Sparcs) were sooo much more powerful than PCs that we had in our homes. Seven years later I was replacing all our Sparcs with x86_64 Linux boxes... too bad Sun just couldn't keep up with hardware development. It would be nice if Oracle really did ramp up hardware R&D for Sun, but I can't see those announcements being anything more than reassurances to nervous enterprise customers.
Doesn't mean they'll build them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Overcome by events (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And costs are astronomically solar. (Score:1, Insightful)
And it will cost 50x the cost of cheap PCs?
Surely as google does it, its better to have 20 x cheap pcs each running E5400's or anything thats less than $100/cpu with $50 mb's
Everything eventually fails, its not worth spending 50x more for something that lasts 2x longer, when replacement costs are super
cheap, and the replacements are going to be even faster.
Google? How many tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars has Google spent developing the software that can run on piece-of-shit boxes?
It sure as hell is relevant to be able to buy one box that simple non-redundant apps can run on when the alternative is trying to pay massive amounts to develop fault-tolerant and redundant custom apps that can run on two or three cheap boxes.
Because unless you can run your software on lots and lots of boxes like Google does, it's cheaper to throw high-end hardware at availability and redundancy than it is to develop redundant and highly-available software. $50,000 gets you just a few months of developer time when you factor in all the overhead costs.
Re:Not a good idea to publish this (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)