INDUSTRY

First Agreement Shows Sun Microelectronics' Ability to Drive Broad Adoption of Sun Technology: Sun Microsystems today announced a far-reaching technology licensing agreement with Marvell. Marvell will build and sell high- performance networking products based on Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology-the industry's first network interface designed to optimize throughput between multithreaded processors and the network-to enterprise server and OEM markets. Marvell will also build specific products for Sun using this technology, which represents the highest throughput 10 Gig E technology available today. Adoption by Marvell, a recognized pioneer in network connectivity, is a strong endorsement of Sun's technology, designed to bridge the gap between the high throughput of increasingly powerful multicore, multithreaded processors and 10 Gigabit-per-second networks via a multithreaded, high-performance network interface. The agreement validates the newly formed Sun Microelectronics' charter to drive innovation and adoption of Sun technology in networking, cryptography and high-performance computing. It also affirms Sun's multithreaded, multicore computing strategy-embodied in the Solaris operating system and all Sun's SPARC- and x64-based systems-and is a key enabler to growing the industry ecosystem to support datacenter virtualization and multithreaded computing over the network. Marvell will leverage the immense throughput and advanced capabilities of Sun's technology to offer its customers true 10 Gig E throughput tuned for virtualization and designed for optimal cost. Marvell and Sun are collaborating to further spur innovation for upcoming generations of highly threaded Ethernet I/O in silicon, which are expected to include 10GbaseT, 40 Gig E and eventually 100 Gig E technology. "Today's Internet-driven, media-rich communications are placing new throughput demands on users and enterprises of all sizes," said Dr. David Yen, executive vice president for Sun Microelectronics. "We are delighted to be working with Marvell, which-as the producer of complete, integrated technology for a wide spectrum of data and storage communications needs-brings important expertise and a proven track record in meeting those demands and exceeding customer expectations." "Our customers clearly understand the bottlenecks that occur at the 'on ramps' to the network as multicore and multithreaded CPUs generate more network traffic," said David Young, vice president and general manager, Connectivity Business Unit, Communications and Consumer Business Unit at Marvell. "Sun's architecture creates a way to efficiently break those bottlenecks by multithreading the network interface to increase throughput. Marvell's broad customer base in the communications and storage markets will benefit from this innovative technology." More On The Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology The Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology is designed to work in multithreaded environments by employing multiple DMA channels to reduce the need for CPU resources for I/O processing. In tests using SPARC or x64-based multicore servers, the Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology can deliver application performance improvements of up to four times Sun's current network interfaces and has significantly higher throughput than the competition. The Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology is also designed to take advantage of Solaris' threaded design for maximum throughput, regardless of the processor. While Sun's new Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology is optimized for chip multithreading (CMT) environments, it improves network performance for all processors. The new Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology leverages Sun's tradition of design innovation for high performance and has resulted in 22 patents being awarded to Sun for this technology. For more information about Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology, visit its Web site. For more information about Marvell, visit its web site.