Sun’s Rock rolls further along

Sun Microsystems is reporting another step in the development of its 16-core Rock microprocessor after successfully booting up its own Solaris 10 operating system on a computer with Rock installed.

“The system came up and didn’t burn the part or didn’t burn the board up,” said Jeff Thomas, senior vice president of engineering for Sun’s newly created microelectronics unit.

Running Solaris 10 on a Rock microprocessor means Sun remains on schedule to ship the high-end UltraSparc (for Scalable Processor Architecture) chip multithreading (CMT) processor in the second half of 2008. Rock is to be fabricated by Texas Instruments Inc.

“Bringing up the OS is a very key component to us feeling confident about the execution of our roadmap,” said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for Sun’s Sparc CMT technology.

Multithreading refers to a chip design in which multiple streams of computer instructions, or threads, can travel through a processor core simultaneously. Sun intends to make Rock a 16-core processor, but Thomas said the company isn’t yet ready to say how many threads will be able to run through each core.

The Rock processor is the third in a line of CMT processors from Sun, following the UltraSparc T1, codenamed Niagara, that Sun introduced in 2005 and the UltraSparc T2, or Niagara 2 , coming out in mid-2007. UltraSparc T1 microprocessors power Sun’s T1000, T2000 and Sparc Enterprise systems, which have generated $100 million in revenue for Sun each quarter.

The Niagara and Rock processors are “aimed at different sweet spots in the market,” said Jean Bozman, a server industry analyst at IDC. The Niagara line handles network traffic, such as with telephone carriers, and some smaller database jobs, but Rock is intended to handle even more work.

“With Rock, the idea is that this is going to be a data center machine. It’s going to run a wider variety of workloads,” Bozman said.

Sun envisions Rock processors handling enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other large-scale computing functions, said Thomas.

Sun is one of several chip makers bringing multicore and multithreading processors to market to generate more processing power than can be achieved by simply making single-core processors run faster. They include quad-core chips from Intel and, coming later this year, from Advanced Micro Devices.

Azul Systems, using a different approach, markets “pools” of compute processing capacity with as many as 768 processor cores in one system. It’s designed for transaction-heavy workloads such as those running Java software applications.

Sun recently created a separate unit to develop new microelectronics products for use in Sun products but also to potentially license technology to other companies.

Thomas didn’t rule out the possibility of at least some elements of Rock’s technology someday being licensed to others.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean we would do it,” he said, “but if there were an interesting deal proposed to us, we would think about it.”