Sun lifts lid off Niagara 2 processor

Sun Microsystems is scheduled to release its Niagara 2 processor on Tuesday at a company event in Silicon Valley. The chip will officially be christened UltraSparc T2 and servers based on the chip are expected to ship later this year.

The processor replaces the Niagara 1 that was released in November 2005. Both chips target the space of high throughput servers, systems that have to perform lots of relatively simple calculations such as web servers or telecommunications applications and routers.

The 8-core Niagara 2 doubles the number of threads over the previous model to eight, allowing the chip to perform 64 tasks simultaneously. Because the chip moves from a 90nm to a 65nm production process, Sun achieved a 10 per cent reduction in its overall size.

The chip also offers two virtualized 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, an embedded memory controller and features eight cryptographic accelerators. Each core gains a floating point unit that accelerates number crunching applications such as those found in scientific simulations.

Jean Bozman, a research vice president with analyst firm IDC, typified at the chip as a model that is better optimized to address actual customer workloads. The Niagara 1 was essentially based on technology that Sun purchased when it acquired Afara in 2002.

"This represents more of the Sun engineering," Bozman told vnunet.com.
"It's more optimized for what they want it to."

"Floating point was a weakness in Niagara," said Rick Hetherington, chief technology officer for Microelectronics at Sun. Even though the chip isn't particularly targeting floating point intensive applications, such calculations occasionally occur in most real world applications.

"We cautioned customers against using the Niagara chip [for applications] that may have had floating point content above one or two per cent. That's no longer the case with Niagara 2," Hetherington said.