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SAN JOSE, Calif.—Sun Microsystems Inc. officials disclosed Tuesday that the UltraSparc IV+ “Panther” chip will offer twice the performance of the UltraSparc IV.
At the Fall Processor Forum here, Sun executives gave details of the last UltraSparc processor before Sun and Fujitsu Ltd. team up for a new generation of “throughput computing processors.” Officials said the UltraSparc IV will initially ship at 1.8GHz and top 2GHz later in its life.
“There were three major goals: The first was compatibility,” said Dale Greenley, director of engineering for Sun, in Palo Alto, Calif. “We wanted to be able to reuse the design and make it fit in existing systems.”
Second, the team wanted to double the performance of the UltraSparc IV chip, as well as reduce the occurrence of “soft” errors that can creep into server processors.
The UltraSparc IV+ will offer twice the performance of the UltraSparc IV, according to Greeley. The improvements come from widening the “mitt” of the chips on-board cache; adding more cache increases the chance that a processor will be able to constantly operate, waiting for data.
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