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Is Sun's Niagara Server Viagra?

Posted by simoniker on from the best-title-evah dept.

argonaut writes "Ace's Hardware has an in-depth article on Niagara -- Sun's upcoming parallel server processor with 8 cores and 4 threads each. The article discusses the chip's radical architecture and what kind of performance can be expected from it in traditionally thread-heavy server applications like web hosting, databases, and other multi-user applications. Given the recent cancellation of the UltraSPARC V, it seems this is going to be Sun's new direction for its in-house CPU design efforts. Furthermore, both Intel and IBM are working on other highly parallel processors and AMD is expected to eventually introduce a dual-core Opteron. So, will more threads prop up Sun's performance?"

4 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Of course this will be the direction Sun goes in. by NerveGas · · Score: 5, Interesting


    It's the same thing that's been happening for the last decade. As x86 slowly creeps in on Sun/IBM/Whatever's market, they have to come up with something "bigger".

    Right now, the Opteron, with embedded memory controller and gobs of I/O, has really entered what was previously a niche market that Sun made very nice profits from.

    So, now that particular cash-cow has fallen to the ravages of commodity parts, they're moving their sites even higher. Sun's never been the company to make $5 profit on each of 50 million computers, they'd much rather make $300,000 each on 1,000 computers.

    steve

    --
    Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
  2. 'taint no CPU advances going to help Sun now by markc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Any advances Sun may have in CPU performance will be greatly outweighed by two major engineering design flaws they've gotten themselves in to:

    1. overall system performance of their partitionable systems (i.e. the ones people will pay a premium for over low-end systems where Linux on Intel/AMD is killing them) is severely hampered by their 150MHz (Mhz!) backplane. Sun views this as a plus because it allows customers to run boards with differenc CPU speeds (e.g. a 750MHz board (5x backplane speed) and a 900MHz board (6x backplane speed)). So, board to board thruput suffers and overall scalability is reduced.

    2. Their desire for greater hardware isolation between domains, down to only a 2 or 4 CPU board with whatever memory happens to be installed on those boards, severely limits the flexibility in providing workload management between logical servers (domains), as well as less flexibility to create / deploy fewer, smaller servers. IBM's LPAR architecture, and HP's VPARs, are kicking Sun's ASS!

    1. Re:'taint no CPU advances going to help Sun now by hotchai · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What you say is absolutely true, but ...

      1. It is an easier upgrade path for customers. I think Sun learnt that it is easier to sell its customers incremental upgrades than to sell them brand new designs. Remember that the market they sell to (telco, financial) absolutely despises having to test all their mission-critical applications on new, unproven hardware. So while the slow backplane is a performance limitation, many customers may prefer stability to cutting-edge performance.

      2. Wait for the 'Zones' in Solaris 10 ... I've heard it is better than anything IBM & HP have to offer.

  3. This could be HUGE by menace3society · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If Sun doesn't cancel this one, it could put them back on the map for server & enterprise-class computing. Low power, awesome multi-threading capabilities, and software that could only be described as "bad-ass" (The 3D Desktop should be out by then) will give Sun a huge edge over everyone that would take years to catch up.

    But that's a big "if."