Sun announced the launch of the ultrasparc iv + Chip

[CCID news] Sun Microsystems announced the upcoming release of ultrasparc iv + chip. The IV + chip-based server runs twice as fast as the ultrasparc IV server. The new chip, codenamed "Panther", will detail details about the high-end processor on Tuesday.

Like the current ultrasparc IV chip, ultrasparc iv + is implanted into two kernels on the same substrate, but the difference is that the manufacturing process is more refined, ensuring higher cache speed and clock speed.

Dell glari, new chip development department director, said that ultrasparc iv + was expected to be available in mid-December 2005, with the initial operating speed of the new chip being 1.8 GHz and a full-load simulation speed of 2 GHz, at present, the fastest ultrasparc IV chip can only achieve 1.2 GHz. Sun plans to detail the new chip functionality at the autumn processor Forum in San Jose, California.

After three years of struggling, Sun finally ushered in a new turn, but the ultrasparc chip family still faces severe challenges from competitors. In addition to running the AIX unix version, IBM's power processor can also run the Red Hat and Novell Linux versions. HP partnered with Intel to launch itanium chips. In addition, Intel's X86 chip and AMD's opteron are becoming more and more powerful.

Sun adopts a dual-core strategy and intends to be close to x86 and opteron chips. Although Sun has previously canceled the ultrasparc v chip, it is still developing a new type of iSCSI chips codenamed "niagara" and "rock", and working with Fujitsu to develop high-end servers.

Sun's long-term development plan continues until four years later. The Niagara server and the products jointly developed with Fujitsu will be available in June 2006, while the rock server will be available in June 2008.

Like its predecessor, ultrasparc iv + is provided by Texas Instruments, but its process is different. Ultrasparc IV uses a 130 nanometer process, while iv + uses a 90 nanometer process, and the integrated circuits on the chip have suddenly increased from 60 million to 0.3 billion. Most of the new circuits are used for storage. Ultrasparc IV has 16 MB of cache outside the chip, each of which is 8 Mb, while the iv + chip itself has 2 MB of cache and 32 MB of cache package.

To speed up the operation, ultrasparc iv + can "prefetch" commands to store the task commands to be executed. The new chip has eight signal channels to transmit commands to the chip, while the ultrasparc IV has only one.

In addition, data transmitted through new signal channels is also protected by data correction technologies. The current ultrasparc III and IV processors that use an integrated board can be upgraded to iv +.

From: SCID