On Monday, October 8 at the Paris hotel in Vegas, Marc Tremblay spoke
at Sun's annual Customer Engineering Conference. Tremblay, a Sun Fellow
with 128 patents, told attendees that Sun is on fire right now.
"Frankly, I've been at Sun 16 years now, and we've never had a lineup
like this," he said. "I could not be more optimistic about this year,
next year, and the next several years."
He noted that Sun's multicore, multithread processor designs "basically
caught the industry with their pants down."
"We are ahead of the rest of the industry, and we plan on staying
ahead," Tremblay said.
For one thing, there's the new "Rock" microprocessor, which should start
appearing in Sun servers next year, Tremblay estimated.
Like our "Niagara" chips, "Rock" chips will deliver outstanding
throughput by processing multiple threads, or software tasks, at the
same time. These new chips will also be able to process a single thread
very quickly. In other words, they will be able to handle any kind of
workload very well.
Tremblay also noted that, "Rock should be the first microprocessor in
the world to offer transactional memory in the hardware."
In simple terms, this new design eliminates the need to lock files,
which slows everything down but has been considered necessary (up until
now) to ensure that various transactions don't interfere with each other.
