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SAN FRANCISCO--Sun is close to finishing development of its UltraSPARC V processor, said David Yen, Sun's executive vice president of processor and network products, on Wednesday at the SunNetwork conference here.

The processor will be manufactured by Texas Instruments using a 90-nanometer process, which will allow for greater density, higher speeds, and lower costs than the 130-nanometer process that will be used for the UltraSPARC IV. The measurements refer to the width of the gates of each transistor on the chip.

At a conference session, Yen showed a sample of the UltraSPARC IV, which he said should be in volume production and on sale in systems before the end of 2003. He would not pinpoint a ship date for the UltraSPARC V, but he said chip foundries in general are not expected to accept designs for 90-nanometer chips until the first half of 2003, and probably will need about a year to tune up for production.

The UltraSPARC V will be followed by an UltraSPARC VI, which like other even-numbered UltraSPARCs will use the same architecture as its predecessor. Yen also confirmed Sun has been working on UltraSPARC VII, but he was coy about details.

"It will be impressive in several different aspects," according to Yen. The chip will benefit from Sun's growing understanding of customer requirements and take advantage of "new concepts in processor design," he said.

Competition Heats

Sun competes against IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel with its high-end 64-bit processors that sit in powerful servers. The vendors have battled to keep their chip performance high and to find interesting ways to package the processors that give them more direct access to other system components such as memory.

Sun plans to tweak its processor designs in coming years to add a variety of different functions that should make UltraSPARCs better suited for certain parts of its product line and applications.

While Yen gave few specifics on the advancements, he said Sun will move toward creating chips that place two processor cores on a single piece of silicon, possibly starting with the UltraSPARC IV. Dual core processors would allow Sun to basically double the processor count in its high-end servers, making them well-suited for scientific computing applications and high end business software.

"The importance of (multicore chips) is more on the software side than on the hardware side," Yen said later. "We are going to have an edge there." He said Sun may even move toward putting four processor cores on each piece of silicon.

Sun is also incorporating technology it gained by acquiring Afara WebSystems in July. Again, Yen kept details on the Afara technology close to his chest but said it would help with churning through network traffic. "Certainly, Afara has networking capabilities built on the chip," he said.

Referring to the acquisition, Scott McNealy, Sun's chairman, chief executive and president, said earlier this week that customers should watch for "some interesting products built on that technology over the next year or two."

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