With the looming menace of the Itanium from Intel the future of server-oriented processors seemed set to be in Intel"s hands, but now Sun have started fighting back with their new range of UltraSPARC processors.
There has been an announcement from Sun detailing the "roadmap" of how it intends to develop its high power processors. The UltraSPARC III is going to be developed to run up to 1.2 GHz, the IV will start at 1.2GHz and will be developed to run at 2.0 GHz while the new UltraSPARC V will debut at 1.8GHz and will reach and surpass the 3GHz mark.
Sun is the current leaders in the UNIX server market and there are currently 1400 designers working on the development of the UltraSPARC architecture. There are still many companies working on software for the technology and it is used in a variety of server deployments across the market.
The average user of a system like the UltraSPARC sees that the clock speed of the processor isn"t the key to an efficient system, and Intel"s ability to reach higher speeds isn"t a major selling point in this sector of the market, the actual performance of the system matters more. The number of instructions per clock cycle is more important and hence why the UltraSPARC has such a dominating market share now.
Texas Instruments manufacture the UltraSPARC processors. The main competition to Sun comes from HP and IBM, who produce less successful UNIX servers. This is a market which Sun has cornered at the moment, but only time will tell whether their UltraSPARC V will keep the trend going.