Monday, 6 November 2006

Wind River to Support Sun's UltraSPARC T1 Processor

Wind River, a Device Software Optimisation (DSO) provider, has completed an 'evaluation port' of its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) stack to Sun's UltraSPARC T1, and plans to offer the industry's first commercial CGL support for the chip, by mid-2007. Wind River describes the eight-way, 64-bit processor as a 'breakthrough' processor for compute-intensive communications server platforms.

Sun launched its T1 design about a year ago, concurrent with the release of Solaris 10. The 8-way processor's threading model has eight six-stage pipelines, which combine to support up to 32 Light-Weight Processes (LWPs), each of which can have instructions executing simultaneously, Sun said at the time.


Figure 1: UltraSPARC T1 Architecture Diagram

Wind River's Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition (PNE-LE) support for UltraSPARC will target systems built on AdvancedTCA blades, including signaling and media gateways, application servers, home subscriber and location registers, and "additional components addressing the latest requirements for 3G and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) deployments," Wind River says. The company reports that in its UltraSPARC T1 implementation, a hypervisor runs across the eight cores, providing 32 physical threads, 28 more than any other general-purpose multi-core processor.