Fujitsu, a maker of various electronics and also a developer of microprocessors, this week disclosed some additional details regarding its Venus processor. Unfortunately, the company is still unsure about availability timeframe for the chip as well as systems on its base.

According to Fujitsu, 128GFLOPs peak performance of eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx (Venus) is 2.5 times higher compared to Intel’s top-of-the-range dual-core Itanium 2, however, even with built-in memory controller Venus consumes only 33% of what Itanium 2 uses, hence, about 35W, according to PC Watch web-site.

Fujitsu SPARC64 VIIIfx processor. Image by PC Watch

It should be noted that Intel Itanium 2 chips only have two processing cores and are made using 90nm process technology, meanwhile, Fujitsu’s SPARC64 VIIIfx (Venus) is made using 45nm low-power process, sports eight processing cores and is not yet available on the market. Intel plans to unveil a new breed of Itanium chips with four cores and produced using 45nm technology. It is highly likely that Fujitsu’s Venus will have to compete against those chips.

Fujitsu SPARC64 VIIIfx processor, die shot. Image by PC Watch

At present Fujitsu is only testing the new processors and so far it has made no comments regarding actual availability. The only official clue is that the chips “will find themselves in applications in the course of the following years” can hardly be considered as an update.

Fujitsu’s SPARC64VIIIfx is aimed at supercomputers and enterprise-class servers from Fujitsu. Theoretically, the chip could be found inside Sun’s servers, however, given that Sun Microsystems was recently acquired by Oracle, the destiny of SPARC-based servers from Sun is not completely clear.

Tags: Fujitsu, Venus, 45nm, Sparc