Fujitsu Pumps Up SPARC64 Chip

For its part, Fujitsu is pushing to gain a larger share of the U.S. server market. While it also sells its Intel Corp.-based Primergy systems, the company will build systems using Intels 64-bit processor.

Fujitsus SPARC64 chips, like Suns UltraSPARC processors, are based on SPARC V9 Instruction Set Architectures.

Fujitsu will continue growing its SPARC64 processor. The SPARC64 VI chips will be used in servers scaling up to 128 processors, with the companies sharing in the design and manufacturing duties.

During the 2003 Microprocessor Forum, Fujitsu Ltd. engineers predicted that the 90-nm SPARC64 would scale to over 2GHz, giving way to the 90-nm, 2.4GHz SPARC64 VI in late 2005.

Sun will continue focusing on its throughput computing strategy, which will include two new processors, Niagara—which will run 32 threads of instruction—and Rock, which will run both single- and multithreaded applications.

Mark Hachman of eWEEK.com and ExtremeTech contributed to this report.

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