Sun has booted its Solaris operating system on a server with a prototype of its forthcoming Niagara II processor, one key milestone for the company’s attempt to restore the relevance of its Sparc processor family. The first Niagara chip, formally called the UltraSparc T1, is used in the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers that have come to market in recent months. Niagara II keeps its predecessor’s relatively low 70-watt power consumption and extends its ambitious design elements, multiple processing cores and execution threads.
8 hardware threads per core instead of 4, 2 CPUs per system instead of 1, and multiple FPU units per CPU instead of one.
Don’t forget the improved math units
*sorry, missed that in the first comment*
These however are where I am expecting a bulk of the preformace increase to come from per core. Having more cores is always nice too
Edited 2006-07-18 17:22
8 hardware threads per core instead of 4, 2 CPUs per system instead of 1, and multiple FPU units per CPU instead of one.
You might want to add 10Gb Ethernet to the bottom line.
Whatever is has – bring in on. For those who dont know the Niagara is the only GPL’d Open Source CPU on the market. If you are into to Open Source. Now you can switch from proprietary CPU’s such as Intel’s Pentium etc, and IBM PowerPC to a totally Open Sourced CPU, that runs Linux, Solaris, and soon BSD.
how much $ for 1 cpu?
how much $ for 1 cpu?
An interesting question. Since you can download the source code of the chip, you could actually do it yourself if you have access to a chip fab
Now, if Sun sold motherboards and processor kits for enthusiats, it might actually create some buzz; but I’m certainly not going to invest $5k into a server, which would be an over kill for what I wish to achieve.
This looks like a seriously cool chip. Anybody running large groups of web/application servers should be looking at the current T1 chips and those who need more horse-power (FPU), should be excited by these new chips. They may save you from having to cluster your apps.
With the Solaris release that will allow you to slice a Niagra box up into multiple machines based upon processor threads you should then be able to create 128 single thread machines in 4U’s. That’s impressive.