Sun Marks Shipment Of 1M UltraSparc Ics

Electronic News, August 24, 1998 by Jim DeTar

The event also provided an opportunity for recently-appointed president of Sun Microelectronics Mel Friedman (EN, March 9) to talk a bit about the future of the Sparc architecture. Mr. Friedman was surrounded by Sun OEM customers and manufacturing partners, including Texas Instruments which is currently ramping the UltraSparc-III on 0.25-micron process in Texas.

III By End Of '98

Mr. Friedman confirmed once again that Sun's forthcoming UltraSparc-III architecture is expected to ship before the end of this year. He noted that it will be Sun's third generation 64-bit architecture while Intel struggles to put the finishing touches on its first generation, the Merced processor, now due out near the year 2000.

Sun's UltraSparc-III was also being showcased last week at the nearby Hot Chips conference on the Stanford University campus. UltraSparc-III will debut at 600MHz on a 330mm-squared die with 70 watt power consumption at 1.8 volts operation. In terms of performance, the UltraSparc-III will reach an estimated 35 SPECint95 rating and 60 SPECfp95 rating.

In a keynote address at Hot Chips titled "Moore's Law Ain't Enough," Greg Papadopoulous, Sun Microsystems CTO, said that ever increasing bandwidth is pressuring the MPU, that what he termed the "bandwidth revolution" is pressuring the ongoing microprocessor revolution.

"We are in the middle of the bandwidth revolution," Mr. Papadopoulous said, adding that some industry observers believe bandwidth is growing at an astounding 10x rate each year.

Taking a swat at the model his own company has until now been proffering to the market, Mr. Papadopoulous said, "The old client-server model worked kind of well but it was expensive." He said "we are now in a transitional step in which the industry is focusing the client on the user experience. You put the web server in the middle in the transitional phase," he said, adding that he believes future applications will consist of Java beans on application servers, which he termed "my personal web site" for each user concept.

Reshaping Strategy

Meanwhile, according to Mr. Friedman, Sun is reshaping its strategy to fit the challenge it faces in squaring off against the industry's largest chip vendor, Intel. He said that although internal sales still constitute the majority of Sun Microsystems' business, he is aggressively pursuing outside merchant business and expects the ratio to shift toward the merchant market side shortly after the turn of the century.

Mr. Friedman, formerly VP of worldwide operations for Sun Microsystems Computer Company (SMCC), stepped into his new role as head of semiconductor operations when he replaced Chet Silvestri as president of Sun Microelectronics earlier this year.

Regarding the shipment of the one-millionth UltraSparc, which has been driven in large measure by sales of Sun's popular Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 workstations, Mr. Friedman said the three-year period it took to get there is one of the shortest spans of time that an enterprise-class architecture has taken to reach this milestone. About 4 million Sparc chips are expected to ship in 1998.