Rock boots Solaris

Perhaps you remember, that i found it quite hard not to talk about something a few days ago: It was because Sun reached a really important keystone in developing the Rock processor. The developers of Rock were able to make a full boot of Solaris on the first prototypes of this new chip. Why is this such a great news: When an operating system booted it has executed vast amounts of code in two ways. You´ve executed a wide range of commands and you´ve executed many of them. So the silicon is at least reasonable stable. Doing so with the first silicon in such a short time is a good sign, that the processes and technologies used in the silicon are well understood and that all the assumptions in simulations were correct. And most important for the analysts and our customers: With UltraSPARC III and IV we missed our timelines the processor for quite a time and got a bad reputation on execution in our processor business. Now we are even ahead of schedule. Niagara I was in or ahead of time. As far as i know, N2 will be in time. And Rock is ahead of schedule, too.