jmke

Sun Microsystems has promised a great deal with its futuristic "Rock" processor line but, thus far, failed to back up the promises with any technical details on the chip's design. That situation changes now that The Register has obtained exclusive information pertaining to the Rock chip - or should we say chips - and its related server family. The information in this story has been corroborated by multiple sources.

Now, there's plenty of meat to be had, but we'll feed the core and thread bigots first. The Rock processor - due out in 2008 - will have four cores or 16 cores, depending on how you slice the product. By that, we mean that Sun has divided the Rock CPU into four, separate cores each with four processing engines. Each core also has four FGUs (floating point/graphics units). Each processing engine will be able to crank two threads giving you - 4 x 4 x 2 - 32 threads per chip.

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