Simon’s Blog

Well, today’s the day that Sun Microsystems unveils its new line of servers based on its new chip - the UltraSPARC T1 aka Niagara. The company is expected to offer variants with 4, 6 and 8 cores, and the servers will have super-low power consumption. There’s also been a hint that the chip designs will be open.

It seems the chip has only one floating point unit to serve all eight cores, so these new products won’t be suitable for high-performance computing. However, if your software doesn’t use a lot of floating point, then Jonathan Schwartz is suggesting that the potential is for the chip to run software five times faster than the fastest Xeon-based systems.

He also suggests that the designs for Niagara may be open. This could enable other manufacturers to build compatible multi-core chips with a low (zero?) royalty hit and no upfront licensing costs. In principle this might mean that there could be more R&D dollars put into future development of Niagara than Sun could put in alone. But, I guess we’ll have to wait for the announcment later today to find out what Jonathan is really hinting at when he talks about an “open market for parts”.

I’m hoping that the product launch will be worth watching. I’d like to get a better understanding than I currently have about what these new boxes will really be good at: particularly, from the point of view of concurrent programming; and from the point of view of how these 8-core single-CPU servers compare to traditional 8-way SMP boxes.