Sun and TI Push Copper UltraSPARC III Processors For Systems Manufacturing

Sun Microsystems and Texas Instruments told us yesterday that copper interconnect-based versions of the 900 MHz UltraSPARC III microprocessor have passed all internal qualifications tests and are planned for shipment in Sun Blade 1000 workstations within the next 90 days. Previous versions of the processor used aluminum interconnect technology. Copper enables a clock speed increase while using the same power as the aluminum interconnect-based 750 MHz UltraSPARC III chip. The UltraSPARC III has 29 million transistors with features including an integrated memory controller and 9.6 Gigabyte-per-second system interprocessor bus for scalability; support for an 8 MB, ECC-protected external cache; and an error isolation and correction "Uptime Bus" for system reliability. The UltraSPARC III processor design's memory controller supports up to 16 Gigabytes of memory per processor and frequency isolation to allow mixed-speed CPU support within a single system.