Fujitsu’s chipmaking division released a new SPARC64-based processor this
week that brings the company closer to its destiny with Sun Microsystems
.
The Silicon Valley-based division of the Japanese electronics
conglomerate said its new SPARC64 V would ship before September for use in
UNIX-based servers, especially 8-way, 16-way and 32-way configurations. The
next-generation SPARC64 also incorporates 3 MB on-chip second-level cache.
The company said it plans to use the new 1.89 GHz chip in its PRIMEPOWER
650, 850, 900 and 1500 server models.
Built using 90-nanometer (nm) process technology, the new processor can
also be mixed and matched with previous generations of the SPARC64 chips in
the same system for the PRIMEPOWER 900, 1500 and 2500 models.
Fujitsu said it is also using the silicon to develop core concepts and
develop templates — or pre-verified solutions — that will serve as
functional building blocks for its TRIOLE strategy (virtualization,
automation and integration) in servers, storage, networks and middleware
elements.
The introduction of the SPARC64 V processor comes on the heels of the
enterprise-focused partnership
with Sun Microsystems.
Fujitsu and Sun said they will bring together Fujitsu’s
SPARC64 and Sun’s UltraSPARC product lines by mid-2006 in a program dubbed
the Advanced Product Line or APL. Both chips are based on Sun’s open SPARC
V9 instruction set architecture. The new data center systems family will
include Sun’s Sun Fire hardware and Fujitsu’s PRIMEPOWER products.
“Its arrival demonstrates our consistent technology leadership in the
open systems marketplace and moves us even closer to the realization of
solutions for the Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems Advance Product Line
collaboration,” Richard McCormack, Fujitsu vice president of product and
solutions marketing, said in a statement.
The new chip already has a following. The Chicago Board of Options
Exchange (CBOE) said it would use the RISC processor in its PRIMEPOWER
servers as soon as it is available.
“In handling more than 51 percent of all the options trading in the
United States and 91 percent of the index options trading, we needed a
platform robust and reliable enough to handle the millions of transactions
processed each day on CBOEdirect, CBOE’s Hybrid Trading System,” Curt
Schumacher, CBOE CTO, said in a statement.
Because it is SPARC-based, the new processor is a natural fit for running
Solaris or Java-based applications. The company said it performed 35 to 42
percent better over its predecessor when running the Standard Performance
Evaluation Corporation Java Business Benchmark 2000. That system processed
an unprecedented 663,133 transactions per second, Sun said.
