Is the Rock toast? Sun reportedly nuking high-end server CPU

Here’s a shocker (not): a new report from the New York Times says that Sun is canceling Rock, its forthcoming high-end server chip. Ashlee Vance, who generally has solid sources at Sun, claims that after five years in development, Rock has met an “unceremonious end.” (Actually, I’m not sure I believe this. I bet there was at least a little ceremony, like maybe a few engineers sharing a moment as they took down a breakroom poster of Dwayne Johnson that had clever cartoon speech bubbles glued to it.)

I hate to be so flippant about it, because the cancellation of a project of this size and ambition level is heartbreaking to all of the engineers who wanted to see their efforts validated. But, as I mentioned in my coverage of the early 2008 ISSCC session where Marc Tremblay, who has left Sun for Microsoft, introduced the chip’s novel approach to performance, I wasn’t really sold on it.

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