Product History
In February 2005, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, stated that the "taping out" of Rock would be on schedule later in 2005. However, this tape-out was ultimately delayed to January 2007.
In April 2007, Sun CEO Jonathan I. Schwartz blogged an image of a BGA-packaged Rock chip, labeled UltraSPARC RK, and disclosed that it could address 256 terabytes of virtual memory in a single system running Solaris. The next month, Sun announced that they had created a Rock chip that could boot its operating system, Solaris, successfully. In August of the same year, Sun released details on the use of transactional memory in the Rock architecture. However, as a result of "entirely new design and given its uniqueness and complexity", the release of Rock was delayed to 2008 or 2009.
In 2008, Mark Moir presented "Rock's Transactional Memory and How to Exploit It" at Sun Labs Open House 2008, discussing transactional memory as well as scouting threads and how these mitigated the computing problems not solved by innovative use of massive thread counts of slower processors. That September, the OpenSolaris project started in order to generate patches for the Rock-based SuperNova program.
In January 2009, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced Rock was still on track for a 2009 release. On 10 March 2009 Dave Dice, Yossi Lev, Mark Moir and Dan Nussbaum presented "Early Experience with a Commercial Hardware Transactional Memory Implementation" at the Fourteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '09). They published their "experience with the hardware transactional memory (HTM) feature of two pre-production revisions of a new commercial multicore processor" in 2009.
Read more about this topic: Rock (processor)
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