Rock processor
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This article contains information about scheduled or expected future computer chips. It may contain preliminary or speculative information, and may not reflect the final specification of the product. |
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| Rock Processor Central processing unit |
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| Max CPU clock: | 2.3 GHz |
| Instruction set: | SPARC V9 |
| Cores: | 16 |
Rock is a multithreading, multicore, SPARC-family microprocessor currently in development at Sun Microsystems. It is a separate development from the Niagara (UltraSPARC T1 and T2) family.
Rock aims at higher per-thread performance, higher floating-point performance, and greater SMP scalability than the Niagara family. The Rock processor targets traditional high-end data-facing workloads, such as back-end database servers, as well as floating-point intensive high-performance computing workloads, whereas the Niagara family targets network-facing workloads such as web servers.
Sun expects to ship Rock processor based servers in 2009.[1]
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[edit] Processor core
The Rock processor implements the SPARC V9 64-bit instruction set, plus the VIS 3.0 SIMD multimedia instruction set extension. Each Rock processor chip includes sixteen cores, with each core capable of running two threads simultaneously, yielding 32 threads per chip. The 16 cores are arranged in 4 core clusters. Servers built with Rock will use FB-DIMMs which can be used to increase reliability, speed and density of memory systems. The Rock processor is planned for a 65nm manufacturing process and the design frequency is 2.3 GHz.[2]
[edit] Core cluster
The 16 cores in Rock are arranged in 4 core clusters. Cores in a cluster share an 32KB instruction cache, two 32KB data caches, and two floating point units. Sun designed the chip this way because server workloads usually have high re-utilization in data and instruction across processes and threads but low number of floating-pointing operations in general. Thus sharing hardware resources among the 4 cores in a cluster leads to a significant savings in area and power but low impact to performance. [3]
[edit] Radical Features
Sun has publicly disclosed a feature in the Rock processor called hardware scout. Hardware scout uses otherwise idle chip execution resources to perform prefetching during cache misses.[4]
In March 2006, Marc Tremblay, Vice President and Chief Architect for Sun's Scalable Systems Group, gave a presentation at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on thread-level parallelism, hardware scouting, and thread-level speculation.[5] These multithreading technologies are expected to be included in the Rock processor.
In August 2007, Sun confirmed that Rock will be the first production processor to support transactional memory.[6]
Sun engineers will be presenting the transactional memory interface at Transact 2008, and the Adaptive Transactional Memory Test Platform simulator will be available to the general public in the short term. [7]
More on its Transactional Memory. [8]
[edit] First silicon
In Jan 2007, Sun announced the tape-out of Rock.[9] In April 2007, Sun CEO Jonathan I. Schwartz blogged an image of a fabricated and BGA-packaged Rock chip, labeled UltraSPARC RK, and disclosed that it can address 256 terabytes of virtual memory in a single system running Solaris.[10]
In May 2007, Sun announced the first silicon of Rock booting Solaris successfully.[11]
As a result of the ISSCC more information is coming out. Here is a new article based on this information: "Can you smell what the Rock is cookin'?"[12]
[edit] References
- ^ Sun's Rock chip waves goodbye to 2008 ship date | The Register
- ^ Neal, Brian (March 24, 2003). Architecting the Future: Dr. Marc Tremblay. Ace's Hardware.
- ^ A Third-Generation 65nm 16-Core 32-Thread Plus 32-Scout-Thread CMT SPARC(R) Processor. Sun Microsystems (2008-02-13).
- ^ Chaudhry, S.; S. Yip; P. Caprioli; M. Tremblay (2005). "High Performance Throughput Computing". IEEE Micro 25 (3). doi:.
- ^ Tremblay, M. (March 2, 2006). "High Performance Throughput Computing". PARC Forum.
- ^ Transactional Memory. Sun Microsystems (2007-08-13).
- ^ Applications of the Adaptive Transactional Memory Test Platform. Sun Microsystems (2008-02-13).
- ^ Rock's Transactional Memory. Sun Microsystems (2008-04-25).
- ^ Sun Expands Solaris/SPARC CMT Innovation Leadership. Sun Microsystems (2007-01-18).
- ^ Rock Arrived. Sun Microsystems (2007-04-10).
- ^ Sun Microelectronics Hits Key Milestone in High-End UltraSPARC Development. Sun Microsystems (2007-05-02).
- ^ Sun: Can you smell what the Rock is cookin'?. Arstechnica (2008-02-4).
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