Kryotech Inc, the West Columbia, South Carolina-based chip cooling specialist, looks as if it has won Sun Microsystems Inc as its latest customer. At the Design Automation Show in San Francisco yesterday, Sun was demonstrating a supercooled engineering workstation using speed sorted processors and Kryotech technology to boost the power of its UltraSparc II processor from 360MHz up to 500MHz. Cryogenic cooling provided by Kryotech cools the processor down to -40C, typically providing a 30 to 50 percent performance boost. But until now, Kryotech has concentrated on DEC Alpha, Intel Pentium Pro and Advanced Micro Devices Inc processors. But the move looks something of a stopgap for Sun, which says the workstation is currently still experimental, and that its next generation UltraSparc III will debut at 600MHz without the need for any special cooling techniques. UltraSparc III was originally due early this year and is running around a quarter behind schedule. When it does appear, says Sun, it will be highly scalable enabling systems comprising of up to 1,000+ processors to be built.
