Sun Microsystems is expected later today to unveil the first servers that use its new UltraSparc T1 processor, previously codenamed Niagara.

The new servers are a "game changer" for Sun, according to Fred Kohout, vice president of marketing at Sun's Scalable Systems Group.

"We think we are five years ahead of the competition," he told vnunet.com. "There is not another system vendor in the world that can field a platform with this kind of performance, power and space efficiency." 

The new servers come in the 1U T1000 and the 2U T2000 and target high throughput systems such as web servers and email servers.

The new T1 processor was officially unveiled last month and features up to eight cores with four threads each. This allows it to act as 32 individual processors. In addition to performance, Sun touted the chip's low power consumption.

Online auction website eBay is among the early customers of the system, along with Air France and EDS.

The new servers target systems running on Intel's Xeon processor. Although the T1 systems could also be used to compete with Sun's Galaxy servers powered by AMD's Opteron processors, Kohout emphasised that both target distinctly different markets.

The AMD systems are designed for compute intensive applications such as large databases and analyses. The T1 is built to quickly perform many relatively easy tasks.

While the T1 itself is a new chip architecture, developers will not need to recompile their applications to benefit from the new multi-threading capabilities.

But applications will get even better performance if they use Sun's new Studio 11 development tools designed to support the chip's multi-threading capabilities.

The servers will only support Sun's Solaris operating system for now. The vendor is inviting developers of other operating systems, including Linux and Windows, to port their software to the new server.

The T2000 is currently shipping. Prospective buyers will have to wait until the first quarter of 2006 to purchase the T1000. Prices start at $2,995 for the T1000 and $7,795 for the T2000.