Sun To Boost UltraSparc-IV Clock Speeds in Early February
Thursday, 13 January 2005The word on the street is that Sun Microsystems Inc is getting ready to boost the clock speed on the dual-core "Jaguar" UltraSparc-IV processors that it currently uses in its Sun Fire line of Unix servers.
The kicker to the Jaguar chips, which is expected to be announced at Sun's Network Computing product launch on February 1, is meant to tide over Sparc shops until the "Panther" dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ chips are announced sometime in the middle of 2005, which usually means July or maybe even August in the computer biz. ADVERTISEMENT
The current Jaguar chips have two cores, just like IBM Corp's Power4 and Power5 chips and Hewlett-Packard's PA-8900 chips. The Jaguar chips run 1.2GHz currently and deliver about 80% to 85% more performance than a single core "Cheetah" UltraSparc-III processor. Sun has been vague about how fast it will push up the clocks on the Jaguar chips, but the odds favor somewhere between 1.35GHz and 1.5GHz.
This is a relatively minor boost in performance, but Sun can and does charge a premium for heavy configurations of its Sun Fire servers using the fastest chips it can deliver, which boosts both revenue and profit in a given quarter. These slightly faster processors may only be available for a small number of customers, but some shops need more oomph today and cannot wait until later in the year for the faster Panther chips.
The kicker to the Jaguar chip is something of a surprise based on what some Sun executives have said in the fall of 2004. In September, Andy Ingram, vice president of marketing for Processor and Network Products at Sun, said that the company would be introducing a kicker to the Jaguar chip in the May 2005 timeframe, and then the Panther chip in late 2005 or so.
But a few weeks later, David Yen, who leads Sun's Sparc chip development efforts, told me that there would be no Jaguar kicker and that the Panther chip would be available in mid-2005. Whatever disagreements Sun's systems and chip people were having, it looks like Sun will be moving up shipments of faster Sparc chips and doing both the Jaguar UltraSparc-IV kicker and the Panther UltraSparc-IV+ chip.
Back in October, Yen said that it would take a few months to get the Panther chips across the Sun Fire server line. While Sun is probably hoping to push the Panther chips up to 1.8GHz or even 2GHz, Yen said that the company may get the chip out the door at lower clock speeds to start, perhaps at 1.6GHz.
The Panther chips will be built using a 90 nanometer copper/low-k chip process from Texas Instruments that also adds strained silicon to shrink transistor sizes even further than that copper/low-k process would allow. Generally speaking, the more you can shrink a circuit, the faster you can make it run.
The Panther chip will have an on-chip L2 cache with a 2MB capacity, which should also help boost system performance considerably compared to the 16MB external L2 caches used in the Jaguar chips.
Sun will also add an external, 32MB L3 cache with the Panthers, and will expand chip buffers, provide better branch prediction, and improve prefetch algorithms to further boost performance. When you add it all up, Sun is expecting a Panther-based system to be able to do about twice as much work as a Jaguar-based system with 1.2GHz processors.
Source: ComputerWire via Yahoo
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