ROCK, UltraSparc IV+, APL, and other news!

Well a lot of buzz is going around about next week when Sun will announce some new products. Sun has given the UltraSparc IV+ a speed increase, gotten ROCK silicon, and is about to release the APL line next week. So lots of interesting stuff going on. Here are some articles, I'd recommend:

• UltraSparc IV+ Speed Bump
• Plenty of Sun Users to Skip Fujitsu March
• Sun CEO shows off ROCK ahead of Fujitsu launch
• Pictures of ROCK
• APL Info

Definitely lots of info! The speed up in the UltraSparc IV+ will definitely help customers who are looking to wait for ROCK or protect their current investment in SunFire servers. But I'm sure the APL/OPL servers will offer some performance opportunities in the meantime. Indeed, the APL/OPL servers may be more geared towards traditional applications that are more sensitive to single-threaded performance and are not optimized for CMT. That would seem to make the most sense, because Niagara and ROCK are CMT designs that work best with multi-threaded applications. Time will tell. Hopefully some benchmarks will come out to help customers figure out which platform to choose for which application.

It's great to see the ROCK silicon! This is obviously ahead of schedule and means that ROCK servers are not far off from being tested. In one of the articles above, you'll see a slide presented that shows Sun will release a 2, 4, and 8 way ROCK servers. Even Schwartz has not confirmed the number of threads per core, but has atleast confirmed that each ROCK chip will have 16 cores. So if we were to assume that each core were to have 4 threads that we mean the Platinum server would have 512 threads!

Also it would appear that people have looked at the Niagara 2 additions to OpenSolaris and the trademarks Sun has registered to figure out the model names for upcoming Niagara servers. From what I can tell, the models should be as follows:

• T5120 - 1U, 1 way Niagara 2
  
• T5220 - 2U, 1 way Niagara 2
  
• T5140 - 1U, 2 or 4 way Niagara 3
  
• T5240 - 2U, 2 or 4 way Niagara 3
  

This is my best guess since the first UltraSparc-T2(Niagara 2) servers will be 1 socket servers and the follow on servers will be 2 socket servers. The model names also follow what's been added to OpenSolaris over the past few months and what John Fowler has presented in the past about Niagara 2 and 3.

For those following OpenSolaris builds, you'll notice that the T5120 and the T5220 support is already present under /usr/platform. Also, you'll notice the "SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise" platform. Considering the above articles, it would appear that the new APL and Niagara servers will be known as "SPARC Enterprise" servers. Another interesting piece of info in OpenSolaris is that there is an addition to the sun4u platform called "sun4u-opl". This would suggest that the APL/OPL (Fujitsu Olympus SPARC64) servers will be "sun4u" and not "sun4us" which has traditionally been used for Fujitsu SPARC64. This is how UltraSparc 3 support was added to the "sun4u" line, you'll see "sun4u-us3" under /usr/platform. Hopefully, this will be the case and end the differences in the architectures:)