Sun touts its new chip as pure MAJC
Sun's MAJC chip -- the name is short for Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing -- is aimed at delivering superior processing for multimedia, and it is moving ever closer to shipping. The chip has gone through the engineering process, and manufacturing by IBM Microelectronics has begun.
The chip is now being tested, and samples are going out to a broader audience than had been expected.
MAJC, announced last August, is a completely new processor, and it aims to apply multiprocessor technology to speed the performance of computing-intensive applications, including graphics, video and speech recognition.
For consumers, it means that even though MAJC will often be operating in the background it will be "an enabler" for broadband services, said Marc Tremblay, Sun's (sunw) chief architect for MAJC. "People want to have video on demand and browse the Web in 3-D. However, the (network) infrastructure needs to be enabled, and so do the servers."
While MAJC was originally intended for use as a graphics processor -- and will debut first as a graphics chip for Sun workstations -- Tremblay and his group now have much grander plans for the chip. They would like to see MAJC used to liven up the Web.
"We've gone from (3-D) television to basically flat Web pages," he said. "The Web is pretty boring."
MAJC, Sun believes, could be used to speed performance of Web servers by lending its computing power to e-commerce-related tasks, such as decryption of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transmissions, and by enabling greater graphics performance for applications using 3-D.
"All of a sudden, we're finding applications in electronic commerce because it's becoming more compute-intensive," said Tremblay, who also alluded to partnerships with content providers to help them "realize" the potential of broadband Internet access.
Servers are not the only areas in which Sun will deploy MAJC. The company is also working with top networking vendors to work the processor into network infrastructures.
Sun sees MAJC as an embedded processor for use in next-generation networking hardware, which must handle data and voice traffic. MAJC will likely be used in devices such as cell-phone base stations.
MAJC will also find applications in digital imaging, where it will work inside copiers and fax machines, Tremblay said.
While these new applications may be different from the ones Sun originally envisioned, they play into the basic set of assumptions behind MAJC.
Sun designed the chip with the assumption that today's multimedia, networked-based changes would continue to increase the workload of computers, especially servers, by becoming much more "compute-intensive."
Sun also assumed that devices of any import would be networked and that those devices would be running its Java computing language.
"We're betting that (the increase of compute-intensiveness) changes the way you handle programs ... to be more object-oriented and parallel," Tremblay said. "Programs can be structured so various parts can be run in parallel. An application has the potential of running N-times faster if you have N-processors."
The first MAJC chip, called MAJC 5200, will be have two processors, running at 500MHz each. However, Sun has said MAJC chips could, in the future, include as many as 1,024 processors on the same chip.
IBM (ibm) will manufacture MAJC, at first using a 0.22-micron process with copper interconnects. Subsequent MAJC chips will move to 0.18-micron and will run as fast at 700MHz, also using copper. The chip will eventually move to IBM's higher-performance, silicon-on-insulator design, which boosts the performance of transistors, resulting in a better performing chip.
As it is, however, "two 500MHz cores would run applications faster than a one 1GHz (Intel Corp.) chip," Tremblay says.
MAJC uses a VLIW, or very long instruction word, architecture. VLIW, which processes multiple instructions in parallel, is a popular architecture for high-performance digital signal processors (DSPs) from Texas Instruments Inc. (txn) and Motorola Inc. (mot) DSPs are used in a range of devices, including cellular phones.
Sun chose VLIW because it is also physically less complex than RISC chips such as PowerPC, or CISC chips such as Intel's x86. VLIW chips also have lower power requirements and the potential for higher clock rates. Transmeta Corp.'s Crusoe and Intel's Itanium also use VLIW.
Programmers will need to write to Java, however. MAJC will then use a dynamic compiler technology, called HotSpot, to translate instructions to its own VLIW set -- except in certain applications in which customers will compile their operating system or applications directly to the chip.
By writing to Java, programmers will also get full use of the multithreading capabilities of MAJC. Applications written in C or C++ can be sped up on the fly, but only to about 1.6X, using a technique called Space-Time Computing.
However, all of this work, whether rendering graphics acceleration or decrypting a transaction, will be fairly transparent to the end user.
"All the user should care about is how fast the applications run," Tremblay said.
When it comes to MAJC's success, analysts say Sun needs to bring it to market as quickly as possible.
"If (Sun) doesn't get MAJC out there quickly, it's going to get trodden over by the next generation of consumer graphics accelerators," said Martin Reynolds, a Dataquest analyst who covers processors.
ATI Technologies (atytf), for example, announced a new processor Monday that includes hardware morphing.
"They're getting very fast. You're starting to see this stuff (such as hardware morphing) in real time," Reynolds said.
When it comes to applications in other areas such as e-commerce, Sun is going to have to establish a name for MAJC.
"There will be other processors (customized) for cryptography," Reynolds said.
MAJC will ship this year.
"We predict that we'll have volume this year -- then it's in the hands of our customers," Tremblay said.
Products are expected in the first quarter of next year.