Sun announces new T1 chip

[Deepak]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051114/tc_nm/sunmicrosystems_dc;_ylt=Ap.5v7c44mDN4UFivMa0OF9U.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA4ZnRnZjhkBHNlYwMxNjk1

The UltraSparc T1, code-named Niagara, uses about 70 watts of electricity, closer to that of standard household light bulbs, and less than the 150 watts to 200 watts that most microprocessors in servers consume.

The T1, which has eight processing "cores" on a single piece of silicon to give it more computing power, will be the brains of a line of forthcoming Sun Fire servers due by year's end and that run Sun's Solaris version of the Unix operating system.

 

[Killer-Kris]

It's about time! Now I don't have time to read the article right now, but are there any benchmarks?

I've been anxiously waiting to see what Niagra could do.

 

[3dilettante]

I don't think they'll release a very comprehensive set of benchmarks, and with good reason. Niagra's strength lies in a very small niche in something like a front-end server.

The multiple processor cores can handle a large number of transactions well, so long as they are not processor-intensive. A Niagra server would probably be sold as a more cost-effective way to pass many simple client requests to back-end systems that do the actual grunt worth.

Single-threaded and floating point performance will probably not be competitive, though in Niagra's niche this shouldn't matter. Other multithreaded environments with a large amount of thread synchronization or interprocess communication may get strangled by the tiny caches and coherency overhead.

 

[DemoCoder]

Niagara will run web servers, file servers, and databases very well and cost effectively, which are the most important services for enterprise. There are rumors that Google is going to purchase a bunch of Niagara servers since they are significantly more cost effective and low power compared to Google's HUGE infrastructure of commodity x86 servers.


In 2007 Rock will ship, which combines MAJC with Niagara architecture. It's ILP + TLP and will kick ass at multimedia performance.