Sun Microsystems announced that its Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have shipped systems containing the one millionth UltraSPARC microprocessor. This achievement, occurring in just over three years, represents one of the shortest amounts of time that any enterprise-class microprocessor architecture has reached this milestone. In addition, the UltraSPARC architecture is the first 64-bit compute architecture to reach this level of market acceptance.
Reaching this milestone with an enterprise-class microprocessor demonstrates the demand for the type of highly reliable, highly scalable and highly available offerings that the UltraSPARC architecture enables. In addition, the rate of UltraSPARC shipments continues to grow, creating an enormous opportunity for application developers looking to bring SPARC processor and Solaris operating environment-based applications to market.
"With this achievement, Sun can rightly claim to be the leader in offering 64-bit processor solutions. The industry is already discovering that experience counts," said Mel Friedman, president, Microelectronics, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "And, in 1999, the even more powerful, and truly revolutionary, UltraSPARC-III microprocessor will be available. The compute power in a 1,000-way UltraSPARC-III system can deliver 2.4 trillion operations per second, a more than 2,500 percent increase over what we can deliver in our 64-way UltraSPARC-II systems today."
"This is a significant milestone in Sun`s history," said Masood Jabbar, president of Computer Systems, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Contributing to this success is the rapid acceptance of our new low-cost, high-performance Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 workstations. We are ecstatic about the overwhelming customer response to these powerful new workstations and anticipate their continued success to contribute significantly to our selling the next million UltraSPARC processors."
The UltraSPARC-I microprocessor was first introduced in 1995 at 143 MHz. It featured 5.2 million transistors and was produced in a 0.5 micron technology. Today, the UltraSPARC- II processor is shipping at 360 MHz (with room to move up to 500 MHz), has 6 million transistors and utilizes a 0.25 micron process. The UltraSPARC-III processor, expected to sample later this year, should start at 600 MHz, have more than 16 million transistors and be produced in an advanced 0.18 micron process.
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