Fujitsu readies eight-core SPARC64 chip - (Code name Venus)
Fujitsu’s Takumi Maruyama delivered a presentation on Tuesday at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif. According to a report in Computerworld, at the end of that presentation there was a brief discussion of a future eight-core version of the quad-core SPARC64 VII. The eight core chip has a code name of “Venus”. Sun and Fujitsu jointly developed the SPARC Enterprise server line that uses the SPARC64 chips and Solaris 10.
A 64-way SPARC Enterprise M9000 equipped with quad-core 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered 2.023 TFLOPS on the Linpack HPC benchmark.
Maruyama provided few details, including when the processor will ship other than it will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer process, a step up from the 65-nanometer process used for the quad-core SPARC64 VII.
It will have an embedded memory controller and offer peak throughput of 128GFLOPS, he said, noting that it is being designed for the age of “petascale computing.”
At the same Hot Chips Conference. Sun engineers delivered an update on the “Rock” processor which is now scheduled to ship in the second half of 2009.
Sun now ships systems with many CPU options:
- CPUs of their of design:
- dual core UltraSPARC IV+
- eight-core UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2+
- single-core UltraSPARC III and IIIi (some Sun Netra models)
- Partnered with Fujitsu (dual core SPARC64 VI and quad-core SPARC64 VII)
- Partnered with AMD (dual and quad-core Opteron)
- Partnered with Intel (dual and quad-core Xeon)