Sun Microsystems engineers have begun designing Niagara 3, a second sequel to the company’s ambitious lower-end processor. John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun’s server division, confirmed the development in an interview Tuesday and suggested it will continue Sun’s push to squeeze more processing cores onto the chip. This new member of the Sparc family will be built using a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer circuitry elements, he said.
Niagara 3 already? I’m biting my nails waiting on 2! Hurry up Sun, you’ve spoiled me and I want *more*!
It’s much like what DEC did with the alpha. They had the EV7 out, EV8 almost finished and had the specs for EV9 basically done and were working on the specs for the EV10
Yes, but didn’t DEC get bought and gutted by Compaq?
Yes that’s what happened, but hey, who could buy Sun? They are too big for anyone… a merger with another builder could be of great help, but still. I hope this CPU get them back on track and help them to kick intel’s butt.
Someone could buy SUNW. Market cap of 18.25b. HPQ has 16.0b in cash. If SUNW slipped a bit in valuation and HPQ bulked up some more cash, it could be theirs if they really wanted it. I admit this is a bit (though not entirely) far fetched. I adore Sun and worked on CPU research and design for two years for them so I am certainly glad to see them succeed. Slighly related tidbit, it still cracks me up that AAPL has a larger market cap than DELL.
“Yes that’s what happened, but hey, who could buy Sun? They are too big for anyone.”
No-one expected Compaq, maker of crap PC’s, to buy mighty DEC either.
To whom would it be a great help? HP/Compaq gut and Windowsisation every acquisition – HP/Compaq is Microsofts bitch, to put it bluntly, Sun is the only company out there who is actually doing something different and delivery rather than simply falling inline and becoming yet another low quality Dell would be vendor.
I don’t want more big iron, I want good consumer grade cheaper (multi) processors that don’t take much power and enable some form of innovation on the dekstop. *86 instruction sets & the dominance of microsoft don’t allow that to happen.
Niagara based servers aren’t big iron by any definition. They are volume servers. Unless you consider anything that is not a PC/desktop big iron.