sparc

Fujitsu has begun shipping the brains of a new Japanese supercomputer to be built at the government-funded RIKEN research institute and designed to perform 10 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second.

The system, called K, is massive. It's planned to have 800 racks of computing gear housing 80,000 of Fujitsu's SPARC 64 VIIIfx processors running at 2.2GHz, Fujitsu said. The processors will be interconnected with a high-capacity direct-connection network that permits fast communications between neighbors.

Although the system is under construction now, it won't be ready for production use until 2012, Fujitsu said.

The system initially … Read more

How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel's best Core i7?

Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel's next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.

That's IBM's widely anticipated Power7, which it described at last week's Hot Chips conference. But if you're interested, you'd better be prepared to spend a lot more than four times as much per chip. IBM isn't talking about pricing, but large … Read more

There's been a lot of speculation that Oracle purchased Sun for its software assets like Java, Solaris, and--although this point has seen more debate--MySQL. Even those of us who viewed the acquisition as a serious play by Oracle to become a full-fledged system vendor figured those systems would be mostly x86. That's not to say Oracle would kill SPARC processor development and servers outright--the installed base is too large and profitable--but it would be a business to milk, not to invest in.

However, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, writing in an e-mail interview with Reuters, claims to have big … Read more

Update at 7:25 a.m. PDT: Updated stock information added and headline updated.

Sun Microsystems shares soared more than 10 percent in premarket trading on Thursday, following a Bloomberg report that the struggling hardware maker was interested in resuming merger talks with IBM.

Sun climbed nearly 10.8 percent to $6.79 a share in premarket trading. But as the markets opened for regular trading, Sun's shares settled back to a more modest uptick of 2.77 percent to $6.30 a share. The broader markets were mixed.

Either way, its stock remains a ways off from the $… Read more

In the wake of reported merger talks with IBM, Sun Microsystems executive vice president John Fowler talked about Big Blue as a rival.

Fowler, in a phone interview Friday, discussed IBM as a competitor in the server computer market and the competitive differences between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

"IBM is obviously a classic competition space where we bring to bear all of our technology innovation," Fowler said. "In this particular case, how we've incorporated and done networking technology, how we've incorporated and done flash (memory). The fact that we have an open operating system … Read more

Sun Microsystems shares fell as low as about 13 percent Monday afternoon, steeper than the declines experienced by the broader markets. Investors, who are awaiting word on whether speculation of an IBM merger will become a reality, apparently were spooked, sending shares as low as $6.82 a share in afternoon trading.

Shares of Sun lost 59 cents to close at $7.24, down about 7.5 percent, Monday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, fell as low as about 4 percent to 7,437.59 during intra-day trading and the Nasdaq dipped about 4 percent to 1,484.98. … Read more

During an employee Webcast earlier this week to discuss Intel's stock options program, the chip giant's CEO, Paul Otellini, shed a little background on Sun Microsystems' pursuit to find a buyer.

When queried by an employee about his thoughts regarding an IBM-Sun merger and whether Cisco's recent announcement about entering the storage market drove Sun to find a buyer, Otellini said:

Oh, I don't know if the Cisco entry spurred IBM. I think (a) cheap Sun price--a low price--spurred a lot of interest. I can tell you that Sun was shopped around the valley and around … Read more

Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems launched a family of new servers based on the SPARC64 VII processor. In contrast to Sun's "CMT" (Chip Multithreading) UltraSPARC T1 and T2 designs that deliver aggregate performance using a large number of threads, SPARC64 takes a more conventional approach that is more rooted in parallelism and performance at the level of a single thread. This design is more attuned with the performance requirements of typical enterprise back-end applications and databases, whereas CMT has more of a network-facing orientation.

SPARC64 comes from Sun's partner Fujitsu, which also designs and builds the … Read more

Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu have announced a quad-core version of the Sparc64 processor and servers to that will use the chip.

Fujitsu--which manufactures and designs the Sparc64 processor--along with Sun unveiled the M4000, M5000, M8000, and M9000 enterprise servers that use the new quad-core Sparc64 VII chip. The two companies claim the processor delivers 80 percent better performance using 44 percent less power than the previous Sparc64 VI processor.

The Sparc64 VII is made on a more advanced 65-nanometer process than the Sparc64 VI chip, which used a 90nm node.

Sun is no stranger to multicore--putting many processing cores on … Read more