Sun Supercomputer Waits on AMD Chips
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Launch of high-performance Constellation system depends on delivery of quad-core 'Barcelona.'
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AMD has delayed rollouts of its higher-speed enthusiast level quad-core CPUs for at least one quarter.
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Despite Intel's early quad-core lead and Sun's recent announcement it will no longer be offering AMD-based servers exclusively, an AMD executive says his firm intends to woo corporate ITers with promises of better performance and more built-in benefits including virtualization.
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All systems slow Exclusive Servers based on Sun Microsystems' Rock processor will now arrive in the second half of 2009, The Register can confirm.â¦
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AMD uses a technology called PowerNow to control power supply to the processor depending upon how much of the processing power is being used.
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Switch blade Sun Microsystems has introduced the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, which offers a choice of blades powered by the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, Intel Xeon processors, or AMD Opteron processors and supports Solaris, Windows, and Linux operating systems.â¦
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After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.&#39;s latest processor, a quad-core server chip called Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the market Monday.
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A competing chip from rival Advanced Micro Devices will likely arrive several months earlier.
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Sun doesn't want to bring its Solaris operating sytem to Intel's Itanium chip. This week.
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A co-founder of Sun Microsystems plans to introduce a supercomputer that will compete for the title as worldâs fastest.
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Shaky silicon eyes 2009 You'll all be shocked to learn that Sun Microsystems appears set to delay the release of the Rock processor.â¦
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Sun Microsystems Inc. is preparing to launch two systems that will bring its UltraSparc IV processor into the low end of the company&#39;s server product line.
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(InfoWorld) - AMD on Monday is giving the public an advanced look at how its pending quad-core chip will improve performance and save energy. AMD, playing catch-up to rival Intel, whoseÂ quad-core XeonÂ product launched in 2006, will discuss features of its quad-core product, code-named Barcelona, at the International Solid States Circuits Conference in San Francisco, a forum for engineers in solid state circuitry and system-on-a-chip processor design. AMD says it will present details at the conference of how Barcelona, due to be released in mid-2007, improves performance and energy efficiency over the competition and over its own dual-core processor, the Opteron, which it introduced in 2003. Barcelona will feature "Enhanced PowerNow" technology, which will dynamically adjust core frequencies as workloads change in order to power down cores when not needed to save energy, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for Opteron. Under the PowerNow technology already deployed in the dual-core Opteron, the OS delivers the needed power to the busiest core, but if the other core is not as busy, it will still receive the voltage demanded of the busiest core, Kerby said. But with Enhanced PowerNow, while the busiest core will receive the power it needs, the OS will reduce the frequency and voltage of the remaining cores because they aren't as busy. "We still see power savings with our current PowerNow technology, but it's going to get better with Barcelona because we're going to be able to dynamically and independently adjust the core frequencies of each individual core," he said. Also in Barcelona, the OS will directly communicate with the CPU instead of first going through the CPU driver, a more efficient approach, he said. "With Barcelona, there is no CPU driver middleman. The OS can tell the processor directly, 'Hey this is how much work I'm doing,' and the Barcelona core will determine when the best time is to make that change. It's not doing it blindly," he said. Barcelona also separates the power management of the cores from that of the memory controller, which is embedded in AMD-designed processors. That way, frequency and voltage can be reduced to the cores when they are not busy and increased to the memory controller when it is busy, and vice versa. AMD claims an 80 percent reduction in memory controller power usage with this design change. Barcelona will also feature enhanced clock-gating, which means core logic circuits can be turned on or off to save power. Like settings on a coffee grinder, the chip can do "coarse" or "fine" clock gating, shutting down increasingly finer sections of core logic as needed. AMD claims that Barcelona can deliver a 40 percent improvement in performance over "the competition." While not mentioning Intel's Xeon specifically, AMD has long pointed out that its quad-core chip will be four cores designed on the same piece of silicon, while Intel's design is two dual-core processors packaged together.
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Out of Africa and the labs Just weeks after posting a profit, Sun Microsystems has dealt out another shocker â a future version of its UltraSPARC T1 chip should arrive on time.â¦
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Embrace the future Intel has followed Sun Microsystems by releasing development tools to optimize the performance of applications running on multi-core, multi-threaded chips.â¦
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Way past its prime Sun Microsystems has turned to half-truths where its UltraSPARC IIIi+ processor is concerned. The company has cancelled the product, once slated for 2005, in favor of concentrating on the UltraSPARC T1 - aka Niagara - processor line.â¦
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DRESDEN, Germany, June 26  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) -- Sun Microsystems, Inc.  is demonstrating innovative High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions this week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.