He's Dead Jim!

Well the rumor on the street this week is that Sun has killed off the UltraSPARC-RK or ROCK processor. This was suppose to be a 16 core processor for the upcoming SuperNova servers. This would be an unfortunate blow to the SPARC family and to Sun customers as there was a lot of hope that ROCK would take the high-end of CMT against the M-Series servers and allow customers to consolidate large amounts of applications. Hopefully, this is all just rumor and speculation. I could only imagine this happening if one of the following were true:

• The 8-core SPARC64 VIIIfx "Venus" processor out-performs ROCK by a significant amount, thusly making it impractical to move forward with ROCK.
• The 16-core UltraSPARC-KT "Niagara 3" processor out-performs ROCK by a significant amoutn, thusly making it the new high-end CMT processor.

Unfortunately, without real sources to confirm any of this, it's difficult to know for certain if ROCK has been canceled or just delayed again. There have been numerous delays over the past few years and some have been rumored to be the result of layoffs and politics. Either way, it's not looking good for the ROCK processor or SuperNova systems at this point. If it has been canceled, it'll be a big blow to the LDoms Community and users as those servers would have been LDOM enabled and given a higher level of RAS features than are currently available on volume CMT servers. Time will tell..