Kazumi Hayasaka

The 10th Generation 16-Core SPARC64™ Processor for Mission Critical UNIX Server

The 10th generation SPARC64™ processor named SPARC64 X contains 3-billion transistors on a 588mm2 die fabricated in an enhanced 28nm high-κ metal-gate (HKMG) CMOS process, with 13 layers of copper interconnect with low-κ dielectrics. More stress control, SiGe improvement and S/D optimization achieve about 10% higher performance than the standard 28nm high performance (28HP) process. SPARC64 X runs at 3.0GHz and consists of 16 cores, shared 24MB level 2 (L2) cache, four channels of 1.6GHz DDR3 controller, two ports of PCIe Gen3 controller, and five ports of system interface controller. ccNUMA is adopted as its memory system, and a cache coherence control unit for multi-chip systems with up to 64 processors is integrated into L2 cache control circuitry for lower latency and reduced area and power consumption.