Sun's Niagara 2 doubles down with twice the threads
By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com
Sun Microsystems' "Niagara 2" processor will be able to run 64 simultaneous instruction sequences, twice that of its predecessor, when it debuts in servers during the second half of 2007, a Sun engineer said on Tuesday.
The current UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"-based servers can run 32 threads -- eight processing cores that each can run four threads. Niagara 2 still has eight cores, but each can run eight threads, said Greg Grohoski, one of the chip's architects, speaking at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California.
"We received first silicon around the end of May, and we booted Solaris in five days. We should have systems to market in the second half of next year," Groholski said. Though he didn't release any performance statistics, he said Niagara 2 goals include more than doubling the processing throughput and more than doubling the throughput per watt consumed.
The first Niagara was an ambitious design that Sun used to try to restore customers' shaken faith in the company's chip engineering skills. And Sun has had some success, selling US$100 million worth of Niagara servers in the second quarter of 2006, only a few months after the radically different design was launched in late 2005.
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Sun Microsystems' "Niagara 2" processor will be able to run 64 simultaneous instruction sequences, twice that of its predecessor, when it debuts in servers during the second half of 2007, a Sun engineer said on Tuesday.
The current UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"-based servers can run 32 threads -- eight processing cores that each can run four threads. Niagara 2 still has eight cores, but each can run eight threads, said Greg Grohoski, one of the chip's architects, speaking at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California.
"We received first silicon around the end of May, and we booted Solaris in five days. We should have systems to market in the second half of next year," Groholski said. Though he didn't release any performance statistics, he said Niagara 2 goals include more than doubling the processing throughput and more than doubling the throughput per watt consumed.
The first Niagara was an ambitious design that Sun used to try to restore customers' shaken faith in the company's chip engineering skills. And Sun has had some success, selling US$100 million worth of Niagara servers in the second quarter of 2006, only a few months after the radically different design was launched in late 2005.
Read more..
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