Sun intros 8-core processor servers, open-sources T1 chip spec

New York (NY) - In an effort to regain ground in the global server market, Sun today made several announcements, including two "eco-friendly" servers based on the 8-core UltraSparc T1 processor: The new T1000 and T2000 servers can outpace Intel and IBM rivals, Sun claims. A new open source program is targeted to bring Linux and FreeBSD to the T1 platform.

Sun's announcement does not arrive a day too soon. The global server market is healthier than ever before, showing solid growth rates for almost any vendor and chip manufacturer participating in this field. According to IDC, factory revenues climbed by 8.1 percent year-over-year to $12.5 billion in the third quarter of this year. But the lion's share of this growth goes into IBM's, Dell's and HP's pockets. But Sun has been on a downhill slide, most recently losing 7.6 percent in its quarterly revenues year over year.

So it's no surprise the company comes out full swinging, rallying investors, analysts and journalists and spark excitement for its new architecture and products. The company claims that its new "9.6 GHz" servers will achieve, depending on the benchmark, between 70 and 400 percent more performance than competing systems. At the same time, the new systems consume only 20 percent of the power required for IBM, Dell and HP servers, Sun promises.

In a separate announcement, Sun said that it plans to open-source "the UltraSparc T1 code", which primarily aims to bring new operating system support to the platform. At this time, the T1 only runs on Solaris 10; by open-sourcing parts of the architecture, the company hopes to ignite projects that will bring Linux and FreeBSD to the T1000 and T2000.

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