Sun's Rock tapes out

The first one up was Rock, the successor to Niagara, or more to the point, the next big thing in the whole CMT line that Niagara started. Where Niagara had small FP-free cores, Rock is supposed to be a full on Sparc chip with few compromises.

It is claiming to have 16 cores on a 65 nanometre process, but if you look at the size of Niagara today, well you have to wonder how it is going to pull it off. We will know soon because it is due in about 18 months or so, today's announcement was that it taped out.

That brings us to Niagara, and the news here is that it got a speed bump from 1.2 to 1.4GHz along with a doubling of memory to 64GB. No word on upgradability, but since it is a speed bump, it should not be all that big a deal.

Next up is a project called Neptune. It is a 'multi-port' 10 GigE network chip that supposedly brings line rate 10GE to servers. The first rev is aimed at Niagara boxes, but it will come to others, specifically x86 servers later on.

Basically, Sun is now officially talking about the two products and launching one. Tech details are really sparse, but that is sure to change soon. Rock and Neptune look interesting, Niagara is just incremental. More when we get it. µ