Sun kills off lower-end UltraSparc IIIi+

MAKER OF CHIPS AND BITS Sun has killed off its lower end Serrano UltraSparc IIIi+ chip in favour of the racier Niagara family.

Sun had originally promised the known universe that it would introduce the UltraSparc IIIi+ chips in the V215, V245 and V445 servers. It had even promised to show them off at a Sun event in September.

John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, said instead that Serrano would be killed off in favour of the more popular Niagara 2.

Sun did a similar thing with the UltraSparc V "Millennium" chip and the low-end dual-core UltraSparc II-based design, Gemini in 2004 to prop up its alliance with Fujitsu's Sparc64 processors.

Fowler admits that the UltraSparc IIIi+ was only a moderate speed grade and not worth bothering about anyway. Niagara on the other hand has eight processing cores, each able to execute four simultaneous threads.

More here. Oh wait, I mean here. µ