Reginald,
Lest you think that SUNW is waiting around for the vaporware Merced which it has already ported Solaris to as an alternative chip, should it ever arrive, SUNW's real interest is in the SPARC for which it has a well defined roadmap. This roadmap was outlined over a year ago and will be made with the help of Texas Instruments and its unmatched .07 micron technology.
While the SPARC will remain the dominant platform for "big iron", the new MAJC chip, also designed by Bill Joy, with its massive parallel and scalable architecture will be coming into its own next year for network appliances.
Here is the SPARC roadmap released last year:
sun.com
SUN UNVEILS COMPREHENSIVE SPARC(TM) ROADMAP
Multi-Series Product Line Reaches 1.5 Gigahertz
SAN JOSE, Calif. - September 1, 1998 - Sun Microsystems,
Inc., today disclosed the roadmap with frequency estimates for
its three series of high-performance 64-bit UltraSPARCTM
processors. Sun is one of the first microprocessor suppliers to
publicly unveil its current roadmap into 2002. This roadmap
provides a detailed overview of the future processor
performance for an industry-leading architecture, while
maintaining binary compatibility. In the roadmap, the
UltraSPARC V is estimated to reach 1.5 gigahertz (GHz) early
in the year 2002.
This roadmap shows that Sun's UltraSPARC processor family
will be among the performance leaders well into the next
millennium and represents the company's ongoing
commitment to the SPARCTM processor family. As a result,
customers can rely on Sun to provide a steady delivery of high
performance processors, which maintain binary compatibility,
while also spanning to four times the current clock speeds and
more than eight times the performance of current offerings.
''The SPARC architecture is central to Sun's success and we
are committed to providing systematic performance
improvements with this architecture,'' said Mel Friedman,
president of Sun Microsystems' Microelectronics Division.
''Our SPARC roadmap stakes our claim of performance
leadership today and in the future.''
*****
''Sun's SPARC processor strategy has resulted in a very
stable roadmap for our customers that protects their
investments and ensures they never have to face a massive
legacy code migration,'' added Friedman. ''The combination
of SPARC with Sun's Solaris provides industry-leading
performance, reliability, scalability, availability and
serviceability for the industry's highest performance enterprise,
telecommunications and networking workstations and
servers.''
For the manufacturing of its UltraSPARC processors, Sun
uses Texas Instruments' world-class manufacturing facilities.
This virtual operations arrangement allows Sun to leverage
Texas Instruments investment in fabrication facilities and
provides Texas Instruments with high-performance products
that are process drivers for its technology. On August 27,
Texas Instruments announced a new process technology with a
drawn gate length of 0.10 micron and a L-effective 0.07 micron
that will enable devices utilizing up to 400 million transistors to
be build. Sun will be using this technology to develop its
gigahertz processors.
"Texas Instruments' leading CMOS sub-micron process
technology continues to keep the UltraSPARC family at the
forefront of processor performance,'' said Julie England, Vice
President, Computer and Imaging Systems, Texas
Instruments. "TI and Sun have been through five major process
technology nodes over the course of our relationship. TI is
pleased to enter the next decade working with Sun to enable
future generations of SPARC that will operate at clock
frequencies well beyond one gigahertz."
SPARC and MAJC, a winning combination in the network era,
Michael |
