Thursday, August 16, 2007

Sun Niagara T2

Sun recently launched a new chip, named Niagara UltraSparc T2. T2 posses tremendous processing power packed in. It has 8 cores on die, each capable of holding 8 threads at a time. There is a dedicated FPU per core. Some features worth mentioning are - bigger L2 cache, on die 10Gbps NIC, virtualization support, on die PCI Express lanes, a crypto unit per core and 4 memory controllers. Since each core can hold 8 threads simultaneously, where other CPUs would make a context switch, T2 would save time. Those features make T2 a pretty obvious target for computing power hungry applications.
Sun has been pushing this chip to market as a commodity so that it can be used for general purposes like - big data centers, financial services (will benefit from the on-die crypto unit), web services, big telcos and proprietary solutions. It is quite evident that Sun MicroElecronics division has traded higher CPU cycles for low power consumption. T2 runs on a rather low CPU frequency of 1.4 GHz where the competition is running processors worth 3-4GHz fast. Clearly, Sun has pushing parallel computing as much as possible since this approach consumes low power by having a low frequency CPU while using all possible benefits of parallel computing.
As of now, this approach seems to be a winner. T2 is safely ahead of competition in terms of throughput, power consumption and efficiency. And it is currently leading the SPEC benchmarks. Interesting thing is to see if Sun can keep this lead. Intel n AMD are in the process of rolling out their quad-core CPUs to market shortly. Also running a low frequency CPU, it would be interesting to see single thread performance on T2.
Sun has to really push this chip so as to pursue customers to adopt this Sparc chip instead of their usual x86 setups.
Sun is planning to introduce the next processor named Rock in next year. It would be an excitement to see what improvements does Sun bring into the new processor over T2. Sun also claims Solaris has been successfully run on T2. Using Solaris along with ZFS on T2 would be a killer combination as of now. Eagerly waiting for the first official Sun launch of a storage box based on T2.
P.S. A new MIT startup has announced its new chip Tilera, a 64 core processor with features same as US T2, likewise, on chip DIMM, gbps NICs, PCIe lanes etc. It provides a mesh of cores, which serves as an alternative for high speed bus interconnect. The clock cycles are within the range 600MHz - 900MHz. It usually takes one cycle to move data from one core to another. Would be nice to see a comparision benchmark of Tilera against US T2.