LSI and Fujitsu announce new Sparc64 IXfx processor

On November 15, LSI announced it's collaboration with Fujitsu in the design of the new multi-core Sparc64 IXfx processor. Fujitsu have long been known for developing high-performance computing products, having built Japan's first supercomputer in 1977. LSI are better known for creating custom silicon, and have been experts in that field for many years. Together they developed the Sparc64 IXfx, ideally suited for HPC applications.

Developed using a 40nm technology, the Sparc64 IXfx has 16 cores, each with 32KB each of instruction and data cache, and 12 MB of shared level 2 cache. It operates at 1.848 GHz, and the peak performance is 236 GFLOPS with a power consumption of 110 W, adding up to 2.2 GFLOPS per W of power used.

There are 3 basic parts to each core. The Instruction Unit (IU) controls instruction fetch, issue and completion. The Execution Unit (EU) consists of 2 integer operation units, 2 address calculation units, and 4 floating-point multiply-add units (FMAs), as well as performing integer and floating point operations. A Storage Unit (SU) executes load and store instructions.

Each FMA can execute 2 floating point instructions per clock cycle (add and multiply). A single SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instruction can operate 2 FMAs, and a core can execute 2 of these per clock cycle. This all adds up to 128 floating point operations per clock cycle for the chip.

The integrated memory controller (IMC) has a bandwidth of 85GB/s and is capable of controlling 64 GB of memory.

On November 7, Fujitsu announced the availability of the PrimeHPC FX10 supercomputer, which will use the Sparc64 IXfx processor. In it's maximum configuration, this system will have 98,304 processors and 6291 TB memory, and be capable of 23 petaflops performance, all for an expected power consumption of 23 MW. This would make it twice as fast as the current fastest supercomputer in the world, the Sparc64 VIIIfx based "K" computer, at RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan, with which software will be fully compatible. Fujitsu expect the system to be ready for shipping in January 2012.