Are you going multi-core?

Earlier this month Sun made another multi-core related announcement, and soon we should be seeing AMD’s quad-core Opteron. All this got me thinking about the whole multiple cores on a single piece of silicon issue.

Sun announced another step in the development of Rock, saying that it had gotten its Solaris operating system up and running on the chip that boasts 16 processing engines on a single CPU. Getting the OS to work smoothly on the multi-core, multi-threaded chip is important, so it’s an encouraging step for Sun, which says it should have Rock shipping by the end of next year.

Sun began shipping eight-core Sparc systems at the end of 2005 and says that sales of the UltraSparc T1, also known as Niagara, now account for more than $100 million of Sun’s revenue each quarter.

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Earlier this month Sun made another multi-core related announcement, and soon we should be seeing AMD’s quad-core Opteron. All this got me thinking about the whole multiple cores on a single piece of silicon issue.

Sun announced another step in the development of Rock, saying that it had gotten its Solaris operating system up and running on the chip that boasts 16 processing engines on a single CPU. Getting the OS to work smoothly on the multi-core, multi-threaded chip is important, so it’s an encouraging step for Sun, which says it should have Rock shipping by the end of next year.

Sun began shipping eight-core Sparc systems at the end of 2005 and says that sales of the UltraSparc T1, also known as Niagara, now account for more than $100 million of Sun’s revenue each quarter.

Sun expects to have its second generation Niagara servers, Niagara 2, shipping in the second half of this year and claims the servers, which will handle up to eight threads (or application instructions) per core, compared to four threads for the T1, will provide twice the throughput of the existing Niagara servers.

While customers seem to be interested in Niagara, those systems are geared for network-related tasks. Rock, on the other hand, is seeking a place deep in your data center running databases, ERP or CRM.

I’m just curious. Where do you stand when it comes to multi-core servers? I wrote a couple of stories about multi-core servers last year and at that time buyers were slowly transitioning to multi-core platforms. There were concerns about how per-CPU software licensing would be handled and the worry of single-point of failure with multiple workloads being managed on single systems. Read those stories here and here.

Now that multi-core servers are the norm, where do you stand on the issue? When do you plan to bring multi-core systems in? Where are they going? What workloads are they handling? Would you bring in something like Rock? Let me know.

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