The Jalapeno is a stripped down chip with integrated controller circuits that allows Sun to make entry servers (with one to four processors) that are less costly than those based on the full-blown Cheetah chips, which can scale from dozens to over 100 processors in a single Sun Fire server.
Sun has made a slew of announcements as part of its quarterly product release, the most recent of which is called the Network Computing 2003 First Quarter announcements, or NC03Q2 for short. On February 10, when Sun made the first of its quarterly product announcements with the 12-way V1280 server and the first shipments of the 1.2GHz US-III chip in the Sun Fire 3800, 4800, 6800, 12000, and 15000 servers, the company said that it would be doing product rollouts quarterly to make it easier for customers to digest information and consume products, whether they are dealing with hardware, software, or services. The NC03Q2 announcements include new servers, the debut of the 1.2GHz Cheetah in smaller machines, a new line of midrange disk array storage and related software, plus new middleware and application software and services.
The Jalapeno processors are the interesting bit of the NC03Q2 announcements. As expected, the US-IIIi processor will debut at a 1GHz clock speed and will include 1MB of integrated L2 cache memory. They are the first chips to be manufactured using Texas Instruments Inc’s 130 nanometer Epic7 seven-layer copper process.
The Jalapeno processor includes the same chip core and 64 KB L1 data/32 KB instruction L1 cache memories as the Cheetah US-IIIs, but some of the electronics for supporting large caches and big symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) clusters have been removed. The Jalapeno processors will only be used in two-way and four-way servers, although Sun could debut a line of uniprocessor machines based on the chip. The Jalapeno processor has 87.5 million transistors (63 million of those for the 1MB of L2 cache memory and its controller) and throws off around 50 watts running at 1GHz. The Jalapeno chips have a new system bus called JBus, which replaces PCI I/O buses and SMP electronics and is akin to the HyperTransport bus developed by Advanced Micro Devices. JBus is not based on HyperTransport, although Sun is a licensee of that technology. JBus supports servers with from one to four processors, eight memory banks supporting 8GB of total main memory using current SDRAM (or current when we talked to Sun last summer about these machines) in a single server. The JBus has four processor ports, two I/O ports (which support PCI buses), and a single unidentified port that could end up being used for system clustering.
Sun was expected to announce two different servers using the Jalapeno chips, a two-way machine code-named Enchilada and a four-way machine code-named Chalupa. With the NC03Q2 announcements, Sun has actually announced two variants of two-way Enchilada machines; it is expected to debut the four-way variants at some later date. (My guess is the Sun Fire V440, as the Chalupa is expected to be called, will come out with the NC03Q3 announcements sometime this summer.)
The Sun Fire V210 Enchilada server is a rack-mounted machine that supports from 512MB to 4GB of main memory, has two hot swap disk bays (supporting 36GB Ultra160 disks in a base configuration), a single PCI slot, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a single power supply. The V210 also supports an optional SSL encryption daughter card that does not consume the single PCI slot in the box. The entry configuration of this server is expected to start shipping worldwide on May 20 for $2,995.
The Sun Fire V240 server is not, as many of us reported based on rumors we heard, a Chalupa box, but rather an Enchilada. The V240 is a two-way capable machine with a 2U form factor that supports from 512MB to 8GB of main memory, four disk drives, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and has two power supplies. The Sun Fire V240 will ship on May 20 as well, and a base configuration will sell for $3,495.
In addition to the Enchilada servers, Sun is now shipping the 1.2GHz US-III processors in the Sun Blade 2000 workstation and Netra 20 and Sun Fire 280R servers. The Sun Blade 2000 is a two-way workstation that has been shipping with a 900MHz and 1.015GHz US-III processor. The Sun Fire 280R is a rack-mounted two-way server that has been selling with the 900MHz and 1.015GHz US-IIIs and the Netra 20 is a two-way ruggedized server aimed at service providers that has been selling with the 900 MHz US-IIIs.
Sun is charging $9,995 for a base Sun Blade 2000 configured with the 1.2GHz US-III, compared to $7,595 for a base workstation using the 900MHz chip, a 30% premium for about 30% more computing power. However, Sun is shipping the 1.2GHz processors in the Netra 20 and Sun Fire 280R servers without boosting the prices on these machines. This has the effect of boosting the price/performance of these machines by between 18% and 30%, depending on the processors used in the earlier generations of servers.
Sun has also announced a firmware upgrade for the service processors used in the Sun Fire line of machines – the 3800, 4800, 6800, 12000, and 15000 servers – that gives these machines auto diagnosis and recovery features that proactively monitor systems for failing components and isolates them before they cause a crash.
Other hardware announcements include Sun’s third generation of PCI-based SSL encryption co-processor cards. The Sun PCI III co-processor can encrypt information on Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows environments, and this generation includes a faster processor that does the encryption quicker and support for more Windows environments. It costs $695. Sun has also announced a new graphics card for its workstations and servers, the Sun XVR-1200 accelerator, which is a 3D card that Sun says has five times the graphics performance and four times the texture mapping performance of its predecessor, the XVR-1000 accelerator. The XVR-1000 card cost $3,495, and Sun has chopped prices on the new card to $2,995, yielding a very big difference in price/performance. Sun is doing this because the advance of technology in the Intel-based workstation market and price competition are fierce. Sun is also announcing a new 2D graphics card, the XVR-100, which is aimed at entry workstation users in technical and financial markets; it costs $295. Its predecessor, the Sun PGX64 2D card, cost $445.
Source: Computerwire
