Although Sun Microsystems is on the verge of announcing details of its Advanced Product Line server partnership with Fujitsu--systems that use the Japanese company's Sparc64 VI processor--Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz couldn't help but publish pictures of his company's own high-end "Rock" processor.
Rock has 16 cores, a high-end incarnation of the company's aggressive push toward cramming multiple cores on a single chip. Rock-based servers are due to ship in systems in the second half of 2008, the company has said.
The chip package has 2,395 pins, of which 812 are for communications between the chip and the rest of the server, Schwartz said.
Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu plan to announce the fruits of their Advanced Product Line (APL) server partnership Tuesday in New York.
John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president for servers, and Chiaki Ito, a corporate senior executive vice president at Fujitsu, will make the announcement, according to an invitation for the event. The APL systems were due to ship in mid-2006, according to the original plan announced in 2004, but the schedule slipped into 2007, and Sun said in February that the APL products would ship in the first half of the year.
The APL systems use Fujitsu's dual-core, dual-thread "Olympus" member of the Sparc64 processor family. Fujitsu designs and builds its own processors that are compatible with Sun's UltraSparc models; Fujitsu's models include reliability features from its mainframe servers. Sun signed the Fujitsu partnership at the same time it scrapped its own UltraSparc V processor and focused design resources on its own high-end 16-core "Rock" processor due to ship in servers in the second half of 2008.
In what was something of a surprise for Sun, the company's UltraSparc IV+ processor fared better than expected in the marketplace, and Sun just goosed the line with new 1.95GHz and 2.1GHz models. However, some analysts believe Sun's high-end server sales were lackluster in the first quarter of 2007, historically a tough one for the company.
Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz is a fan of corporate transparency, sharing his thoughts and personal experiences on a publicly available blog. Some of his minions used that style, along with Sun's Blackbox data-center-in-a-shipping container project and the company's telecommuting policy--as the basis for an April Fools' Day joke.
A mock news release trumpeted OpenWork 3.0, a plan to build eco-friendly offices into shipping containers. And John F. Prowler--John Fowler, Sun's top server executive disguised with Groucho glasses--offers a tour of the top-shelf model geared for corporate titans in a YouTube video.
Fowler explained that the solar-powered, glass-walled container--called Project EcoBox and installed in Sun's Menlo Park, Calif., campus--is geared for Schwartz and Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos. (In reality, Schwartz shares an office with Chief Financial Officer Mike Lehman.) Webcams provide an around-the-clock view of what the CXOs are up to.
"Because of the latest Sarbanes-Oxley rules, we wanted full transparency for our executive staff. We've put in Web cameras so office work is actually on the Net," Fowler said in the video. "It's not enough to know all your financial transactions. We'd like to actually watch them at work on a full-time basis."
Schwartz and Papadopoulos both are gourmet cooking fans, so the EcoBox comes equipped with dual Easy-Bake ovens (rack-mounted, like most of the servers Sun sells), complementary aprons, and a stocked wine cabinet. Bonus features include a wide-screen TV, a loft for naps, and outside, a bistro table and hot tub.
"They can cook, they can drink, they can work, they can relax," Fowler said. "If the CEO or CTO likes to have company, we have a fully functional hot tub for bringing the company in and having great discussions around strategy and other aspects of the company performance."
OpenWork 3 is a reference to Sun's policy that permits employees to work from home or from satellite offices. Many Sun employees don't have regular office space but instead use anonymous empty cubicles. The program previously was called iWork, but Sun ran afoul of trademark issues concerning Apple's word processing and presentation software of the same name.
Sun hopes customers will want to buy computing equipment in Sun's Blackbox shipping containers instead of building their own data centers; Blackboxes can be easily shipped and set up in parking lots. The idea extends to the EcoBox, too, according to the news release: "Strong but slender, EcoBox shipping containers can be wedged into small plots and stacked up to 9 units high--sufficient to not only move executive management out of the building, but middle management as well!"
April Fools' pranks are an annual tradition at Sun. Some are documented on the company's Web site. For example, pranksters floated the new Ferrari of co-founder Bill Joy on a landscape pond in 1987.
Chris Ratcliffe, director of Solaris marketing, has left Sun Microsystems, and Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris marketing, has announced plans to leave, the server and software company said.
Goguen is leaving for personal and family reasons, and Ratcliffe is pursuing other interests, spokesman Russ Castronovo said Tuesday.
The Register first reported news of the departure.
Sun Microsystems has become a "patron" sponsor of the Free Software Foundation, the organization founded by Richard Stallman that ultimately spawned the open-source software movement.
Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer, announced the move on his blog Saturday.
"Both organizations have been promoting software freedom in different ways for more than two decades, albeit in different ways and with different objectives," Phipps said.
The move fits with Sun's expressed fondness for version 3 of the General Public License (GPL) whose development the foundation now is leading. Sun is releasing Java as open-source software under the GPL.
Patron status gives Sun the right to market itself as such, two hours of consulting on licensing issues, and five T-shirts and baseball hats and miniature CDs that boot a version of the foundation's Gnu's Not Unix (GNU) operating systems based on the Linux kernel.
SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems' forthcoming Niagara 2 processor will run at a core clock frequency of 1.4GHz, one of the processor's engineers said Monday.
Sun's Umesh Nawathe disclosed the chip speed during a speech at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here. Sun had been mum about the clock speed before.
Sun's first-generation UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"-based servers are the first of a new generation of chips designed for "throughput"--getting many tasks done simultaneously if not necessarily completing each task as swiftly. Toward this end, Niagara has eight processor cores, with each core able to run four instruction sequences called threads.
Niagara 2 also has eight cores, but each core can execute eight threads. As with Niagara, Sun will be able to sell chips even when defects mean some of the cores can't be used, Nawathe said.
A board set up to advise and govern OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to make its Solaris operating system an open-source project, has urged caution when it comes to releasing the software under the forthcoming version 3 of the General Public License (GPL).
Sun is looking warmly at the idea of dual licensing Solaris under GPL 3 and the current Community Development and Distribution License.
The OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board, which is evolving into a group called the OpenSolaris Governing Board, is not so enthusiastic. "OGB, having carefully weighed the available options, concludes and decrees that...any option related to GPLv3 dual licensing be re-assessed no sooner than six months after the GPLv3 has been published and approved," the group said in a position paper on the Solaris CDDL/GPL 3 dual license issue after a long mailing list debate.
Al Hopper, one member of the board, said in an interview that Sun could go ahead and dual-license Solaris if it so chose. However, there would be political repercussions: "For starters, they would loose the trust of the OpenSolaris community at large," he said.
The board gave several reasons for its conclusion. "There is little, if any, benefit to dual-licensing OpenSolaris with CDDL and the yet to be approved/upcoming GPLv3 license--aside from possible short-term good press for the project," the group said. On the flip side, "There are significant downsides to dual licensing, including, but not limited to, license complexity, confusion and the possibility of long-term bad press from any exception language that such a license would inevitably require."
And the group argued that GPL fans won't be mollified. "GPL licensing OpenSolaris would be yielding to a small, vocal minority of FOSS (free and open-source software) developers who use the lack of GPL licensing purely as a means of fostering FUD (negative propaganda in the form of fear, uncertainty and doubt) towards OpenSolaris and who will, in all likelihood, find some other workable mechanism to continue to foster FUD towards the project."
SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is helping to fund the development of Sun Microsystems' upcoming servers with Xeon processors, Sun Chief Financial Officer Mike Lehman said Tuesday.
"For engineering, we will get paid for that by our friends at Intel," Lehman said at Sun's analyst summit here, discussing the upcoming line of Intel servers.
"Unlike our friends at Dell, we will disclose that," Lehman said, needling a rival currently afflicted with a shareholder lawsuit involving Intel payments.
Sun plans to begin selling the Xeon servers by the end of June, when Sun's fiscal 2007 ends, but for that period of time Sun expects "no significant" revenue from the deal, Lehman said.
Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz emphasized that Sun isn't scrapping its formerly exclusive x86 processor supply relationship with Advanced Micro Devices. "We are adding Intel into the product line. We are ramping rapidly with AMD," he said.
Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday unveiled an expanded program to woo Sun server customers using either Sun's Sparc processors or x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Under one element of program, HP is expanding its certification of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system onto seven new Intel Xeon-based server models. HP argues that capturing Sun Solaris customers lets HP persuade them to buy Linux instead, but Sun argues that Solaris is the stickier relationship and that the operating system is leading to new customers.
The other element of the program is geared for those running Solaris on Sparc chips. Customers with that technology now can use HP's Itanium servers running Linux instead, bridging the gap by using translation software from start-up Transitive.
Intel, trying to get its Itanium processor to catch on more widely, touted the Transitive option at its Intel Developer Forum conference last September. Pat Gelsigner, co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, introduced a demonstration of the technology with the words, "Ladies and gentlemen, the highest-performance Sparc machine: the Itanium platform you see here today." (However, the test compared Itanium to a 1.5GHz Sparc chip that had been surpassed at the time by a newer 1.8GHz model.)
Bruce Perens, an author of the Open Source Definition that codified elements of the collaborative programming philosophy, is set to bring the approach to hardware designs.
On Monday, Perens plans to announce the TAPR Open Hardware License, a document written by John Ackermann designed specifically to govern hardware designs that can be modified and redistrubuted. Perens plans to submit the license to the Open Source Initiative for its as an open-source license.
Version 0.9 (click for PDF) of the license can be downloaded from the Tuscon Amateur Packet Radio Web site. A public comment period on the license lasts through March 7.
The license includes provisions to prohibit those who distributed designs under the license from filing patent infringement lawsuits against those who use those designs patent suits. The license also includes a central site to which hardware developers can provide feedback on the design and a variation that prohibits commercial use of the design.
Open-source hardware is not unknown, but is much rarer--and more unproven--than open-source software. One recent example is Sun Microsystems' OpenSparc processor, which is the open-source version of the "Niagara" chip that Sun sells under the brand name UltraSparc T1.
Sun's chip design is governed by the General Public License (GPL), a seminal and widely used open-source software license. One organization, Simply RISC, has created an OpenSparc variation.
