Sun Microsystems, in the process of being bought by Oracle, reportedly is
killing its long-anticipated “Rock” chip program.
Sun officials for years had touted the multibillion-dollar project as a key
part of its overall revitalization plan, saying that it would compete with
higher-end processors from such rivals as Intel and IBM.
However, the New York Times, quoting two unnamed sources, reported June 16
that Sun officials have
ended the development of the multicore UltraSPARC processor, which
initially had been scheduled for release last year, but had been delayed
until this year.
Sun spokespeople have declined to comment on the report.
Rock, which Sun officials have been talking about since at least 2005, had
been planned as a key piece of a larger strategy to revive Sun’s flagging
fortunes. Sun had already moved aggressively into the x86 space by adopting
Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron processors—and later started using Intel chips
as well—and had established its multicore “Niagara” line of UltraSPARC chips
for low-end systems, a business that has been growing for Sun over the past few
years.
In the meantime, while awaiting Rock, Sun struck a deal
with partner Fujitsu to jointly develop higher-end servers based on
Fujitsu’s SPARC64 processor architecture.
In various papers released by Sun engineers, Rock was described as a 16-core
chip that would have clock speeds of up to 2.3GHz and would be based on the
company's CMT (chip multithreading
technology).
The idea was to use Rock for computing environments where parallel
processing was needed, offering a total of 32 main instructional threads and
well as two other "helper" threads that would pregrab instructions,
retire older instructions and clear the memory, which would improve
performance.
Along with the delays, the Rock program was dealt another blow in March 2008
when David Yen, who was overseeing both the Niagara and
Rock programs as executive vice president of Sun’s Microelectronics Division, left
to join networking company Juniper.
Rock was an expensive project, which should make the move to drop it
palatable to Oracle, which is looking to buy Sun for about $7.4 billion. Sun
stockholders are scheduled to vote
on the acquisition July 16. The deal is expected to close this summer.
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