A few weeks ago, just as Yen’s team was raising the curtain on the Panther chips, other Sun executives gave us the impression that we should expect a kicker to the current Jaguar UltraSparc-IV processors in 2005 and then the Panthers running at 1.8GHz or so sometime after that, maybe as much as nine months later. (Other publications reported the same information.)
This is not the case, says Yen. In fact, he expects that Sun will roll out the Panther chips around mid-2005 and that it will take a few months for them to roll up and down the product line. Yen also says that Sun may ship slower versions of the chips, perhaps running at 1.6GHz or so, depending on how yields turn out.
Yen also said that the company would be shipping faster versions of its single-core UltraSparc-IIIi processors, tentatively called the UltraSparc-IIIi+ chips, while boosting the on-chip cache from 1MB to 4MB, as it moves from 130 nanometer to 90 nanometer processes.
The UltraSparc-IIIi chips are used in entry Sparc servers and currently top out at 1.6GHz. Yen did not say how high Sun could crank the clocks on the UltraSparc-IIIi as Texas Instruments (Sun’s sole chip fab) moves to that 90 nanometer process. Above 2GHz is a good guess.
