CompuWorld

When there is room for one, there is room for more, and as many of the markets already have a competitors battling for the supremacy on those particular segments, there isn't much headroom for newcomers, or even new ideas. But what about a veteran with a new idea, that might work, and it's just the thing the computer industry would require, some fresh information to feed upon. Guilty for bringing the intel is Sun Microsystems, whose CEO and president, Jonathan Schwartz announced on his blog about new processor, called the Rock, no connection to the guy interpreting the Scorpion King from The Mummy.

The Rock processor has 16 cores, and it can support up to 256Terabytes of RAM “in a single software domain (plain vanilla OpenSolaris, no less)”. The CPU has 2395 pins, 812 used for signaling and 1514 for power/ground purposes, the other serving (apparently) no purpose whatsoever. Schwartz also said about the memory support that: “That is an awful lot of RAM in a single system (and given the cost of memory nowadays, you'd want to post an armed guard next to that machine).” But on the other hand, details such as “how many threads per core; why this chip heralds the golden age of effortless parallel programming; how it brings fault tolerance to the masses” are still being kept secret for the time being, but it sure sounds like whatever they have prepared for us is going to be big. As for a time frame when this product will be available on the market, I'll just have to paraphrase Mr. Schwartz and say “stay tuned”.

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