Sun's Big Splash - Spectrum, IEEE

T he Sunnyvale, Calif., campus of Sun Microsystems Inc. is a quiet and peaceful place with six low-rise buildings connected by tree-lined walkways. But the tranquility masks a frightening real-ity—Sun is in serious economic trouble. The company was badly splattered by the burst of the dot-com bubble of 2000. Revenues for this once towering colossus of the server industry went south, and its stock plunged from more than US $60 in 2000 to less than $3 in 2002. Recently, the stock has been slowly but steadily climbing, and at press time it was selling at more than $5—a sign that the worst may be over for the company. But Sun, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., is still far from its glory days of the last decade. It could use a small miracle to get back solidly on its feet, and at last the company may have one: a new microprocessor chip intended for the volume servers that are the heart of data centers running the information and Web processing for businesses, universities, hospitals, factories, and the like. Sun's engineers have had working chips since last spring and are now heavily into testing and debugging them and making design changes for the next fabrication run in early 2005. The server business generates $50 billion a year, according to Jessica Yang, a research analyst at IDC, Framingham, Mass., and Sun's share recently is about 12 percent—down from 17 percent just four years ago. Sun's new chip, called Niagara for the torrent of data and instructions that flow between the chip and its memory, was designed from the ground up to do away with the impact of latency—the idle time a microprocessor spends waiting for data or instructions to arrive from memory. This latency is one of the biggest impediments to the microprocessor's ability to do real work. Niagara was not conceived at Sun. It started life in classic Silicon Valley fashion, as the brainchild of a Sunnyvale start-up called Afara Websystems Inc.