14 DAY TRIAL // LSI Corporation and Fujitsu have announced earlier this week that the two companies are working on developing a new SPARC64 CPU dubbed the IXfx and designed especially for HPC use that will include no less than 16 processing cores.
The upcoming SPARC64 IXfx is manufactured using the 40nm production node and its 16 computing cores feature 64KB I/D of cache each as well as 12MB of shared L2 cache memory.
The clock speed of the new chip is set at 1.848GHz and is estimated to deliver a whopping 236.5GFLOPS of double-precision performance while consuming just 110W of power.
The performance that this new Fujitsu SPARC64 CPU is capable of is downright impressive when compared with its current version, the Fujitsu SPARC64 VIIIfx, which includes eight processing cores and has a peak performance of 128 GFlops when running at 2GHz.
“The SPARC64 IXfx delivers the speed and flexibility our supercomputing application customers are looking for,” said Akira Asato, general manager of LSI development division of next generation technical computing unit at Fujitsu.
“The combined expertise of LSI and Fujitsu utilized in the development of the SPARC64 IXfx provides customers with increased performance and allows them to run essential applications more effectively,” concluded the company's rep.
Neither Fujitsu or LSI said when these new chips will become available to their customers, but the two companies are committed to deliver this as soon as possible.
“To meet their requirements, Fujitsu desired a partner with deep expertise in highly complex SoCs and the know-how to meet aggressive schedules and performance targets,” said Sudhakar Sabada, senior vice president and general manager, Custom Solutions Division, LSI Corporation.
“Collaborating with Fujitsu on the SPARC64 IXfx processor underscores our commitment to working with customers to deliver time-to-market solutions for mission-critical deployments.”
Fujitsu's current SPARC64 VIIIfx eight-core processors are the driving force behind Japan's 10.51 PetaFLOP K-Computer, the most powerful system in the world today and the first supercomputer that managed to retain its crown in the TOP500 list.