SUNW: Sun Expands Solaris/SPARC CMT Innovation Leadership

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced two advances that demonstrate its continued leadership in chip multi-threading (CMT) and commitment to advancing the SPARC architecture. Sun successfully completed the tapeout (initial design completion for first fabrication) of its new "Rock" processor and announced that it's enhancing the performance, expandability and performance per watt of its Sun Fire T2000 servers.


"SPARC CMT and the Solaris Operating System (OS) are the foundations of Sun's business today and in the future," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Sun Microsystems. "The UltraSPARC(R) T1 chip put us way ahead of the competition in multi-core, multi-threaded processing, and generated tremendous interest in our SPARC products among customers. Now with Rock we're expanding CMT to the high-end. We'll be able to deliver the most optimized platform for high-end Solaris based applications, and offer industry-changing improvements in price performance across the entire datacenter."

Sun's New CMT Products

Rock and the enhanced Sun Fire T2000 servers continue Sun's leadership in CMT.

Rock: The "Rock" processor is Sun's next-generation, high-end SPARC CMT product line, and its design is focused on delivering the performance and energy efficiency of CMT technology to high-end systems. The successful completion of this critical milestone helps keep Sun on track to deliver the first Rock-based systems in the second half of calendar 2008.

Sun Fire T2000 enhancements: Sun is enhancing the performance, expandability and performance per watt of its Sun Fire T2000 servers with support for 64 GB of memory and the new faster 1.4GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor. By offering 64 GB of memory in both existing and new systems, Sun is able to improve performance of memory-bound applications by up to 20 percent while enabling the T2000 servers to handle larger workloads and greater levels of application consolidation.

The 1.4GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor has already demonstrated up to 30 percent higher throughput than the existing 1.2GHz processor, while also extending Sun's leadership in datacenter performance and efficiency by delivering 2x higher performance, 5x higher performance per watt and 9x SWaP than current competitive systems. These enhancements enable customers to break through the power, cooling and space limitations that blight many datacenters today, to serve millions of new customers while saving millions of dollars in operational costs.
It is important to note that Sun is also making great progress on the Niagara 2 silicon, and is on target to deliver systems in the second half of calendar 2007.

Sun's CMT Leadership

In 2006, the SPARC product line enjoyed significantly increased revenue growth with the UltraSPARC T1. A year after the launch, the UltraSPARC T1-based T1000 and T2000 servers, running the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), now represent more than $100 million in revenue per fiscal quarter, for Sun, and have played a key role in helping Sun achieve three straight quarters of server revenue growth, according to the most recent IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

Sun continues to invest aggressively in CMT innovation, and remains on track to deliver the benefits of CMT technology across its entire product line – from entry level to high end – in the second half of calendar 2008.