I want one please.

If that is an actual picture of the CPU, that thing is massive.

Also, if anyone remarks "but can it run.." they should be banhammered.

How much?

But can it run Cry...er...oh, nevermind.

you mean Crysis?

How fast? 128 Gflops isn't even twice as fast as the Xeon mentioned. sounds kinda lame to me.

I wanna see the mobo it goes with...

Sparc is a RISC chip, and for most desktop users an x86 CPU could do more with "only" 76 GFLOPs than a Sparc with 128 GFLOPs.

By all means, congratulations to Fujitsu, this is quite an accomplishment - but let's not confuse people by comparing RISC to x86 in performance or power consumption as it is by no means apples-to-apples.

Hmmm... If Fujitsu can make that one, why aren't they making other desktop CPUs???

Damn, just get a dual socket mobo with two XEON Nehalems. None of this fujitsu S**T. Probably be cheaper than a sh fujhujistsu cpu anyways.

It's RISC or Reduced Instruction Set. Which basically means it sucks for multimedia applications and all that fun stuff that people do on their home PCs. The processing pipeline is much smaller and far less complicated than that of our x86/x64 processors. So, in other words, it would be quite a more difficult task to take on Intel and AMD with regard to consumer CPUs. An undertaking that would almost certainly cost Fujitsu more money than its worth.

If it really does what they claim that would make for one kick ass super computer that wont generate massive amounts of heat, now we just have to wait for that to show up for a desktop.

What-eva

just get a intel quad and overclock it......there you GO!

I bet it cost 10x more than the higher-end Intel or AMD cpu also.

its for processing raw data not for consumer uses..

I must be missing something, but I do remember my 8800GT being capable of 500GFlops or so.

EMBRACE THE GPGPU!

And yes, my 8800GT can play crysis

This is preciously what I need to achieve my world domination plans! My minions will be there to pick it up shortly.

i got 2 of those CPU`s under my bed somewhere ....

It is interesting to see how the CPU is 2.5X larger. Must provide better cooling OR it require more cooling. It's cool to see another player in the CPU world. It gets dull hearing the only two contenders AMD and Intel. Same thing with AMD/ATI and Nvidia. We need more teams.

preciously? Do we have a gollum complex today or did you mean precisely? Not to flame but I think its funny

Give it two years, and we'll all look at that thing as if it was a Pentium III.

Good points. No "MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, EM64T". They would also need to get licenses from Intel and AMD for the x86 and other techs.

eh... exit2dos has it right, this is a RISC arch developed for a specific purpose... FP calculations! sorry to tell the intel lubbers this... but even after considering the overhead and other crap necessary to get a RISC chip to run stuff as well as a x86/CISC chip, it wouldn't perform half as bad as the x86/CISC chip would trying to emulate the raw FP performance of fujitsu's SPARC chip... but that is the nature of these chips and why they're designed for specific reasons.

So...does Fujitsu manufacture them and then sun just sells them in server equipment?

The chip is not that big.

That Japanese guy just has small hands.

i can't believe no1 asked this, but is that a fucking GOLD IHS?!

I understand quite a few vendors sell them in the computation market. It's just that most people today are only aware of the bittybox processors used in standard business machines that do text processing.

@buzznut: Faster than the fastest x86 ever, but it's not quite twice as fast(or more), so it fails? That's like booing someone at the Olympics because they only won the 5k by half a lap.

They're just trying to hype up inventory they want to dump because the customer, SUN, is kaput. BTW, Sun has always grossly inflated the abilities of their Sparchitecture. Remember the "MAGIK" chip?

It's amazing to me how many people on a "tech saavy" site still miss the point of RISC computing. Sure, it wont play Crysis. Sure, it's not going to encode DiVX movies. Sure, it's not going to do Adobe Aftereffects rendering for you. But then again, it's not designed to. It's all about FPU calculations. Give this thing a lot of FPU intense work like weather pattern calculations or gene folding, and clock for clock it would stomp a mudhole in anything Intel and/or AMD has to offer. Why? Because it'd designed to do those kinds of calculations. That's like saying the greatest Soccer player in the world is a chump because he can't hit home runs in a baseball game. Makes no sense.

I think most kids here are missing a huge chunk of their education.
RISC CPU's are way faster at a lot of tasks and have a way better power/performance ratio.
In fact this is comparing apples with apples for some part.
The Apple PPC computers used to outrun any given intel or clone back in the day and yes they did fail but not because the RISC platform failed.

Also even though this CPU is not designed for in your desk toaster it is not impossible to run games on the architecture to make it worse most (if not all) game consoles run on RISC CPU's.
And all major RISC players are running altivec/velocity/VMX or even VIM and there are a load of other instruction sets that are capable of competing with SSE* or MMX (IBM even updated there VMX instruction set to VMX128 for the xbox360).

Here comes the kicker both RISC platforms biggest selling point and the reason they fail for home computing (at least the reason fruit companies decided there is not enough money to make on them).
RISC is short for Reduced Instruction Set Computing, lots of calculations require little or even one instruction on an x86 system while on a RISC system to do the same calculation you need to give multiple instructions giving the same end result.
Breaking down the work in smaller jobs is not a bad thing in most cases the work will be done faster however the extra work programming for such a system is a specially at times you might need to get creative.

If programmed well RISC systems will beat any x86 system though since x86 systems are cheaper (time is money) to develop for and IBM/intel (and clones) are widely spread.

I for one wish Apple sticked to RISC and i hoped by some magic reason the pegasos would get an unbelievable market share back in the day if only because good RISC computing (in example POWER PPC or FreeScale) is in my opinion the last real opposition to x86 and motivator to both AMD and intel to Bake something of this world

PS: cuddo's for the this is not exactly comparing apples to apples remark some where on top it really made me smile .