Wikipedia:
Rock processor |
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This article contains information about scheduled or expected future computer
chips. It may contain preliminary or speculative information, and may not reflect the final specification of the product. |
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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-DIMMs 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 servers 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 blogged[8] an image of a fabricated and BGA-packaged Rock chip, labeled UltraSparc RK, and disclosed that it can address 256 terabytes 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
- ^ Vance, Ashlee (March 14, 2006). Sun's Rock goes 16 cores and arrives with multi-core friends. The Register.
- ^ Neal, Brian (March 24, 2003). Architecting the Future: Dr. Marc Tremblay. Ace's Hardware.
- ^ Niccolai, James. "Sun adds Rock to its UltraSparc road map", Computer World, February 12, 2004.
- ^ Niccolai, James. "The Multicore Advantage", Sun Microsystems, September 2, 2005.
- ^ Chaudhry, S.; S. Yip; P. Caprioli; M. Tremblay (2005). "High Performance Throughput Computing". IEEE Micro 25 (3).
- ^ Tremblay, M. (March 2, 2006). "High Performance Throughput Computing". PARC Forum.
- ^ Sun Expands Solaris/SPARC CMT Innovation Leadership. Sun Microsystems (2007-01-18).
- ^ Rock Arrived. Sun Microsystems (2007-04-10).
- ^ Sun Microelectronics Hits Key Milestone in High-End UltraSPARC Development. Sun Microsystems (2007-05-02).
- ^ Transactional Memory. Sun Microsystems (2007-08-13).
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