Sun Microsystems has begun selling a lower-end server using the UltraSparc T1 ‘Niagara’ processor and has passed an important milestone in the development of the chip’s successor. Its Niagara II, now officially named UltraSparc T2, is due to arrive in servers in the second half of 2007, and a higher-end cousin code-named Rock is due to arrive in servers in 2008.
who’d they sell the first one to?
Exactly what I was thinking
You ever use one? I have and considering the machine I have based on limited testing essentially trounces a V880 (except for floating point) and consumes far less rack space and power than one.
These machines are real high on my list for “must buys” in our next round of hardware purchases.
I can confirm your results. In our tests, it beat, like, pants-down, both a V880 and a V890 cluster.
The only complaint we have with the machine (T2000) is the amount of noise it makes (I have it in the office to avoid certain problems with security once the evaluation is over).
Unfortunately for us, we had just completed a hardware buy to replace the machines for our webfarm. With the T2000 we could have run our webfarm on two machines, instead of the five V210’s we purchased.
Well, the T2000 is a silent butterfly, compared to the IBM BladeCenter.
who’d they sell the first one to?
A pretty bad troll, but it had me chuckling once I got it :p
Actually as far as from the JavaBlogs page i read, quite a lot of people are right now testing the free 60 day t2000 server offer from sun, which is not a common thing. You just fill a form and server arrives to your home. T2000 is a very good choice for web related (not floating point intensive) server tasks.
http://www.stdlib.net/%7Ecolmmacc/2006/03/23/niagara-vs-ftphean…
The linked site above shows a T1 beating a dual Itanium and a dual Xeon for a massive FTP benchmark. The margin of victory for the T1 is huge.
“It’s a cheaper way of staying in Sparc-Sun jail.”
Compared to the proprietary, expensive, lack of performance jail that is associated with Itanium? please; it seems that Intel is pissed that SUN SPARC is taking another form of attack besides going for megabertz, and AMD is grabbing from the other side with their Opteron processors.
I’d love to see an T2 processor as a workstaion released, in a Blade 150 form factor, for around US$1000; that would definately get people moving back to SUN for their technical workstation needs; too bad that would be logical, and we all know which path SUN chooses when something logical is presented to them.
Don’t workstations generally need single-threaded performance? You’re probably better off sticking with Opteron.
Don’t workstations generally need single-threaded performance? You’re probably better off sticking with Opteron.
If that were the case, why have dual core/dual processor configurations?
The only last bastion of ‘single threadedness’ is the gain; everything else is threaded; the question isn’t whether its threaded how how much, and by adding more cores, whether it’ll head a higher level of performance.
Workstations these days are certainly using multiple processors, but each processor provides good single-thread performance, so all apps will run well enough. Niagara has terrible single-thread performance, so I suspect many desktop apps will run slowly on it. Honestly I doubt Firefox or Evolution could take much advantage of Niagara, even if they are “multithreaded”.
Workstations these days are certainly using multiple processors, but each processor provides good single-thread performance, so all apps will run well enough. Niagara has terrible single-thread performance, so I suspect many desktop apps will run slowly on it. Honestly I doubt Firefox or Evolution could take much advantage of Niagara, even if they are “multithreaded”.
But if one were to use it as a developer workstaiton; you can easily thread compiling and many other things; Java in itself is a thread monster; if you heavily thread the IDE, run it on Java, you’ll find that Java should be alot more responsive.
As for desktop applications; Firefox has 7 threads with two tabs, for example; take into account, for example, something like Photoshop, which would would be tuned for maximum performance, I wouldn’t be suprised to seeing that heavily threaded to maintain a good level of responsiveness whilst pushing ‘throughput’ in regards to when apply filters and the likes.
Sorry, I don’t want to sound offensive, but you seem to be hiding under some sort of rock assuming that all applications out there are single threaded; this is 2006, threaded applications are common, look in your System Monitor/Task Manager and count up the number of threads flying around in the system.
“I’d love to see an T2 processor as a workstaion released, in a Blade 150 form factor, for around US$1000; that would definately get people moving back to SUN for their technical workstation needs; too bad that would be logical, and we all know which path SUN chooses when something logical is presented to them.”
Most technical workstations run poorly threaded highly FP intensive applications, for which the T2000 is useless. For that price range, SUN offers an actual logical choice: Opteron. Or maybe logic is different at your parent’s basement…
Most technical workstations run poorly threaded highly FP intensive applications, for which the T2000 is useless. For that price range, SUN offers an actual logical choice: Opteron. Or maybe logic is different at your parent’s basement…
If you read the article, the NEXT version of the Niagara will be named UltraSPARC T2; not only will be it SMP capable, it’ll also have a FPU that is around equal to that of a standard/mainstream processor.
Yes, you are correct, the T2000 from THIS generation will be crap as a workstation CPU, but the NEXT one is being lined up, from what it appears, as being an accross the board replacement for the current dual/single core ‘classic’ UltraSPARC processors.
The reason why I also want an UltraSPARC machine is simple; even with all the hype SUN has done around Opteron, it is still treated as a second class citizen, not only in hardware support and software availability, but also the priority things are given with in SUN; the way SUN appears, they seem to be begrudingly pulling along Solaris x86, just hoping there will be a day they can drop it in favour of rushing back to their SPARC homeland.
From the lack of any workstation progress with Solaris, to the lack of decent hardware support in Solaris x86, it speaks volumes for their lack of committment to the x86.
Most applications nowadays are multithreaded, server programs especially, the usual server program opens at least one thread per request and often several ones for long running tasks.
User interface programs usually have at least three threads.
The days of one thread per program are long gone, and with languages where multthreading is a mere opening of a thread instead of hundreds of lines of system calls, you have to dig in deep to find single threaded programs nowadays.