Wednesday, February 17, 2010

UltraSPARC T3 and final 2010.03 ON source

The gate have now closed for what is supposed to become the build used in OpenSolaris 2010.03 (onnv_134). Stopper bugs can of course still trigger a respin. This means that we are getting closer to the next stable release and that we will soon see more interesting stuff in the development branch.

Some interesting things have already been en put back into the the gates which are no longer being restricted to freeze for the release. The perhaps most noticeable is "6917448 processor name update for UltraSPARC T3", which indicates that the final name for the next CMT SPARC processor, UltraSPARC KT, will indeed be UltraSPARC T3.

The processor will be of the same generation as UltraSPARC T2 and T2+, Niagara 2, but with a few additional features such as hardware support for the Kasumi block cipher which is used in GSM and UTMS. This chip will as stated before have sixteen cores.

A good article about the UltraSPARC T3: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/26/sun_rainbowfalls_hotchips

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