Sun plans on-chip security boost for Ultrasparc

From InfoWorld: Sun Microsystems' product plans are up in the air pending its acquisition by Oracle, but the company's chip engineers continue to present new designs in the hope they'll see the light of day.

At the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Tuesday, Sun presented plans for a security accelerator chip that it said would reduce encryption costs for applications such as VoIP calls and online banking Web sites.

The chip, known as a coprocessor, will be included on the same silicon as Rainbow Falls, the code name for the follow-on to Sun's multithreaded Ultrasparc T2 processor.

Most coprocessors are separate from the CPU. They offload tasks that use a lot of computing power, such as cryptographic processing, so that the main processor is free to do other work.

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