The Rock and new servers

The Register has some rumors on new Rock processor:

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.


Sun appears to have a couple flavors of Rock – Pebble and Boulder. Our information on Pebble is pretty thin, although it appears to be the flavor of Rock meant to sit in one-socket servers. Boulder then powers two-socket, four-socket and eight-socket servers. The servers have been code-named "Supernova" and appear impressive indeed. A two-socket box – with 32 cores – will support up to 128 FB-DIMMs. The eight-socket boxes will support a whopping 512 FB-DIMMs. Sun appears to have some fancy shared memory tricks up its sleeve with this kit.