“Sun’s president and chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz declared yesterday that the company’s long-planned Rock processors remain on track for release this year.

This is good news for Sun watchers. With two rounds of layoffs that server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems announced in 2008 biting into the company’s research, development, sales, and marketing, Sun’s customers needed to know which projects and products will live and which will die. Now Schwartz has told them.”

“The Rock chips, which taped out two years ago, include several new technologies that Sun hopes will give it a competitive advantage in the midrange and high-end of the server market.

Among those technologies, the two biggies are scout threads for the Sparc cores and transactional memory, both of which aim to boost the performance of machines more than can clock speeds and execution threads alone. The Rock chips are expected to have 16 Sparc cores, each with two execution threads.”

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Source: insideHPC.