Sun's Rock chip doomed from start

"Even if Rock had made it to market, it would have been an uninteresting processor as companies like Intel and AMD are offering high-performance chips at more reasonable prices, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research." Suggesting 'Rock' is "uninteresting" is beyond comprehension. The UltraSPARC RK or 'Rock' processor by Sun Microsystems is interesting to Computer Scientists, who have worked for decades to speed single threaded performance. Sun implemented many of those theories in 'Rock' silicon such as: - thread level parallelism - thread level speculation - transactional memory - out-of-order retirement - deferred queue 'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the academic world since companies like Intel and AMD have not recently pioneered computer science technologies in silicon to optimize single threaded applications. Implementations of theory in real silicon are very important to review academic thoughts and determine future implications. Implementations like 'Rock' are studied for decades. 'Rock' is a very interesting processor for business, military, and academia system performance of single thread bound applications - software threads on 'Rock' runs with very few of the painfully long waits on slow memory due to cache misses, commonly experienced with Intel and AMD processors. People who purchase systems expect their systems to be doing work, instead of sitting around idle. 'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the commercial world since accelerating existing single thread-bound software allow for acceleration of existing software (which does not scale well with multiple threads) - something the major CPU developers (AMD and Intel) in rest of the market have abandoned. If a single thread is the problem, newer CPU's from other vendors will not solve their performance problem, increase the thread bottlenecked performance, and increase the business profitability. 'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the investment community. The release of Rock would enable Sun to pioneer another niche, abandoned by the other vendors (single threaded performance.) Filling niches has proven to be very profitable for Sun and investors. Sun had pioneered the niche of multi-threaded hardware with the release of their 32 hardware thread UltraSPARC T1 processor - driving proprietary vendors (Intel, AMD) to change their road maps and start seriously threading their CPU's... projects to speed existing single-threaded applications are non-existent today. The release of Rock would enable Sun to pioneer this lost niche, abandoned by the other vendors. Filling niches are very profitable to investors in those technologies. 'Rock' is very interesting to the environmentally conscience consumer. Very little work has been done recently in the market to increase the performance of single threaded software, with the exception of increasing clock rate, which drives up the costs to consumers in: hardware, cooling, and power consumption. Rock has been the exception - targeting increased single threaded performance without aggressively increasing clock rate and the negatives that go along with it. 'Rock' is interesting to the businesses which are consolidating locations. In conjunction with increasing the speed of existing hardware threads making thread-bound applications run faster - with the number of threads per-processor going to 4 to 16, the number of servers required to consolidate multiple locations are reduced to a quarter of the platforms. Interesting is clearly not the problem with 'Rock'. If there is a problem with 'Rock' - the consumer community will need to wait for something more than a rumor.