The Sparc64 RISC processors created by Fujitsu are software-compatible with the Sparc processors created by Sun Microsystems Inc for its Sun Fire line of Unix servers. In October 1999, Fujitsu and Siemens of Germany created a partnership to jointly engineer and to sometimes jointly sell the Primergy line of X86 servers and the PrimePower line of Sparc64 servers.
Siemens was pretty vocal for a number of years, being the dominant player in the partnership for the European market, but Fujitsu seems to be calling more and more of the technology shots for the partnership in the past two years. Sun did not, after all, sign a partnership to resell the Jupiter line of servers next year, which are known as the Advanced Product Line by Sun and Fujitsu, but rather with Fujitsu.
Back in 2003, the Sparc64 V processors were based on a 130 nanometer copper process used in Fujitsu’s Japanese chip fabs. They ran at 1.1GHz, 1.3GHz, 1.32GHz, and 1.35GHz, with the clock speed being dependent on which part of the PrimePower server line (entry, midrange, or enterprise) you were talking about. These chips had 2MB of on-chip L2 cache.
In 2004, Fujitsu launched the Sparc64 V+, which was based on a 90 nanometer copper process and which was able to cram 3MB of L2 cache on the chip. Because of the smaller transistors, Fujitsu could jack the clock speed of the chips up to 1.82GHz or 1.89GHz. With the latest kickers in the Sparc64 V+ chips, Fujitsu’s chip engineers have boosted the on-chip cache to 4MB and have been able to push the clock speed up over 2GHz.
Specifically, in the entry PrimePower 650 and 850 servers, the new Sparc64 V+ chips run at 2.025GHz; in the high-end PrimePower 2500 servers, they run at 2.08GHz; and in the midrange PrimePower 900 and 1500 servers, they run at 2.16GHz. The 2.025GHz version of the chip used in the PrimePower 650 and 850 servers has only a 3MB cache, by the way. All of these new processors are shipping immediately.
Richard McCormack, vice president of product and solutions marketing for the partnership’s Fujitsu Computer Systems unit in North America, says that gauging the new Sparc64 V+ chips against the 1.3GHz version of the Sparc64 V chip it was shipping two years ago, customers should see a factor of 1.6 improvement in performance.
For customers who are on more recent iron using the 1.89GHz Sparc64 V+ chip, the clock speed increases by about 14% but the cache size grows by 50%, which will yield about a 20% performance improvement for the typical PrimePower customer. And because the prices of bare-bones PrimePower machines (the chassis, the processors, plus base memory) have not changed much in the past year, this will equate to about a 20% improvement in bang for the buck. (To be fair, the price of main memory and disk storage have come down over that time, so for a full configuration, the improvement in price/performance can be a bit larger.)
A base PrimePower 650, which can scale up to eight processors, costs $42,780 in a base configuration, while the base PrimePower 2500 machine, which can scale to 128 processors, costs $533,000. These prices are not very meaningful. But McCormack says that a 64-way PrimePower 2500 with 128GB of main memory and base boot disks costs about $2.5m; a fully loaded 128-way with 512GB of main memory costs around $5m. These servers support Solaris 2.7, 8, 9, and 10, and customers with the PrimePower servers that have the XA architecture (those from 2003, 2004, or 2005) can mix and match processor boards from any generation within the same frame.
While Fujitsu has been hinting for the past year that it could boost the clock speed of the Sparc64 V+ chips as high as 2.4GHz, this does not seem to be in the cards. McCormack says that this is the last speed bump for these chips, and that the next performance increase will come from shifting to dual-core Olympus processors.
The fact that Fujitsu is getting a good yield on the 90 nanometer process such that it can move the announcement of the 2GHz Sparc64 V+ chips from this fall to this spring certainly bodes well for the dual-core Olympic processors–at least as far as the process is concerned. But the Olympus chips have a different architecture, and just because the 90 nanometer process is working out now doesn’t necessarily mean some other glitch cannot pop up. Conversely, if the 90 nanometer process was giving Fujitsu headaches now with the Sparc64 V+ chips, PrimePower customers and Sun Microsystems salespeople looking at future Jupiter servers might be getting a little anxious. But that does not appear to be a problem.
Neither Fujitsu nor Sun have given out a lot of details on the Olympus processors, but they are probably going to look a lot like the Sparc64 VI chips that Fujitsu was already planning to create before it inked its landmark partnership with Sun. Fujitsu will confirm that the Olympic chips will be implemented in a 90 nanometer copper/SOI process and made in Fujitsu’s labs in Japan, and that it will have a maximum of 6MB of on-chip L2 cache.
The Sparc64 VI chips were expected to have an initial target speed of 2.4GHz, with speeds eventually ranging between 2.1GHz and 2.6GHz. Sun and Fujitsu have dropped enough hints for us to figure that the Jupiter machines will have 64 sockets, and with two cores per socket, they can preserve the 128-way scalability of the PrimePower boxes and the Solaris operating system. Sun has hinted that there will be Jupiter boxes with four or eight Olympus sockets, and it stands to reason that machines with 16 or 32 sockets will also be available. Fujitsu has said in the past that customers using the Jupiter servers should expect to see a factor of 2.1 improvement in performance over the PrimePower machines using the 1.35GHz Sparc64 V chips.
