Rock tapeout at the ITjungle

Good article about the current and future SPARC-Lineup at the IT-Jungle: Sun Tapes Out Rock Sparc Chip, Gooses Clocks on Niagara Sparc T1

By doing so, Sun could substantially revive its enterprise server business, particularly if it can bring high performance, lots of vertical scalability, and low power consumption in a single package. For this, many corporations will pay a hefty premium. If Sun didn't believe this, it would have killed off the Sparc line entirely three years ago, not just killed off the "Millennium" UltraSparc-VI processor and moved the Rock design into its spot in the Sparc roadmap.

and

Having just taped out on January 3--a few days late, which meant that Sun's engineers had to wear suits to the office for every day they were late--Rock is scheduled to be ready to put into systems in the second half of 2008, says Azhari.

They really had to wear ties, suits and costumes for a short time … i saw photos ;)