Rocking the processor world?
by
Charlie Bess
I was looking at Jonathan Schwartz blog today and saw that Sun has received first silicon of Rock. I’m always interested in what’s happening with Multi-core technologies and this one (with 16 cores on a chip, each one running multiple threads) should really be interesting.
There was also an article in “The Register” that covered Rock, but like most things in The Register, I take it with a grain of salt.
Based on what I can discern from Sun this chip will address many of the floating point issues of the Niagara chip (whose focus was mainly on integer parallel processing). It looks like there will also be Niagara 2 in the latter half of the year.
A while back I wrote about some concerns related to multi-core (e.g., licensing). These kinds of advances really makes me wonder what software possibilities will take place with the parallel capabilities these chips will bring to market. Hopefully Model based development will be ready for this.
