CNET News reports that Sun Microsystems will be making a new processor, code named "Rock", with a whopping 16 cores inside. Here is a bit:

Rock-based servers, due to arrive in servers in 2008, will likely come as competitors' chips have at most eight cores, analysts say. Boosting performance is crucial to Sun's attempt to reverse the diminished influence and use of its Sparc family of processors, which have lost share to mainstream x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and to rivals such as IBM's Power family.

"Sun clearly has gone further with multicore approaches, even with Niagara and Niagara 2, than everybody else. This is just a logical extrapolation of what they've done," said Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood. "If it's going to 16 cores, with multiple threads (independent instruction sequences) per core, it's going to be a real barn-burner."

Servers for years have been built with multiple processors, so it's not as if competitors lacking a 16-core design will have no answer to Sun's products. But packing more performance into a single processor provides a way to reduce processor and system manufacturing costs and to boost performance without compounding today's problems with keeping data centers cool.