Sparc Enterprise Servers get quad-core processor | | 2008-07-14 | | Sun and Fujitsu have announced the latest enhancement to their jointly developed Sparc Enterprise Servers range - a new quad-core processor.
The M4000, M5000, M8000, and M9000 enterprise servers will use the new quad-core Sparc64 VII chip, which, the two companies claim delivers 80 percent better performance using 44 percent less power than the previous Sparc64 VI processor.
The new chip doubles the number of cores on each chip compared with its predecessor, the Sparc64 VI, which was launched last April.
The Sparc Enterprise Server line includes midrange and high-end SMP (symmetric multi-processing) machines targeted at high-availability, mission-critical enterprise applications, including large-scale databases, data warehousing, and enterprise resource planning. They are also used for server consolidation and virtualization.
Sparc64 VII chips can be added to older Sparc Enterprise Servers without needing to change the hardware or software configurations, and Sparc VI and Sparc VII chips can also be mixed and matched within a single domain.
The servers use Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system and Fujitsu’s processor. Although jointly developed they are marketed and sold separately by each company. They are available in eight-way and 16-way configurations, and the companies will continue to offer the older Sparc64 VI processors for customers who prefer them.
Prices start at about $35,000 for the M4000 server, which comes with up to four Sparc64 VII processors and 128G bytes of main memory. The high-end M9000 comes with up to 32 processors (or 64 using an expansion cabinet) and 1 terabyte of main memory, and starts at about $216,000.
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