Sun Rocks Solaris 10 on new Sparc chip

Sun Microsystems announced yesterday that it has successfully booted the Solaris 10 operating system on its high-end Rock Sparc processor for the first time.

The milestone comes six weeks after Sun received its first shipment of prototype Rock processors.

"Booting Solaris for the first time is a critical accomplishment in the development of our high-end chip multithreading technology," said David Yen, executive vice president at Sun.

"This keeps us on track to ship our first systems based on Rock in the second half of 2008.

"These systems will bring unprecedented throughput to high-end enterprise applications like enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and large databases."

The Rock processor is a 16-core UltraSparc implementation geared for single-threaded and multi-threaded high-end applications. Solaris has long supported multi-threaded hardware and applications.

Rock represents Sun's third generation of chip multi-threading processors, following the UltraSparc T1 and upcoming Niagara 2 processors.

UltraSparc T1, with up to eight cores and four threads per core, is currently available in the SunFire T1000, T2000 and Sparc Enterprise systems.

Systems based on Niagara 2 are expected to become available in the second half of 2007. The processor will have up to eight threads per core and combines all major server functions on the processor itself, making it Sun's first 'system on a chip'.

Niagara 2-based systems are expected to deliver twice the throughput of existing T1000 and T2000 systems.

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