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Jonathan Schwartz Shows 32-Way UltraSPARC Chip
Megaslow writes "The latest entry in Jonathan Schwartz's blog has pictures of Sun's Project Niagra chip, with 8 cores * 4 threads per core for a 32-way computer on single chip. He also shows what looks to be a test rig reportedly already up and running Solaris 10."
2. People not happy with big blue can migrate to another vendor without having to take an OS change into account. That means less lock in.
Well, not exactly. If they are running IBM's POWER processor, then they can't really move their applications to another vendor, as no-one but IBM "does" POWER. They could move to another platform and still run Linux (say, x86 for example), and manage to apply _most_ of their sysadmin experience - but any proprietry, binary-only applications running on that box would have to either be bought again or re-licensed. So there would be an OS change, even if it's only from one architecture to another.
-Mark
This isn't made for rendering, or for stuff that requires floating point power.
Since the chip has 8 cores, each core is quite simple. This kind of chip is more suited for database and web servers, where there are lot of simultaneous requests, but fullfilling a single request is quite simple task.
You can find more information about Niagara here.
I think they're particularly looking at things like the C10K problem (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html).
The new Solaris 10 networking code reputedly pays a lot of attention to exploiting, and serving threads well, particularly hardware multithreading if it's available.
If they could squeeze one of these and maybe 8GB+ of RAM into a 1U box or into their blade centre, then I think it'd do quite nicely for serving web.
...an Englishman in London.
There's little point in Sun fighting with intel and amd to produce the highest Mhz chip. They can buy opteron's, stick them in boxes and provide a good low to mid-end system.
OTOH Solaris is already REALLY good at multitasking. The system i'm typing this on has almost 5,000 threads, it's at 80% utilization and it's still very responsive.
As you put more tasks onto a single CPU it'll have to burn more and more cycles doing context switches and suffer from register starvation.
Plus large boxes benefit from economies of scale and can have features that aren't practical in smaller ones:
When a CPU fails the system can take that motherboard out of circulation, then the admin can replace it at their convenience. Same for memory and psu's. Usually no downtime.
Plus we already know that it takes less resources to admin a unix machine than a windows box. Now consider a 144 CPU x 32 Core machine. Even IF it could only handle the workload of 500 windows servers the admin costs are slashed further.
Also consider that the cache might be shared, but then consider that all those cores will most likely be running the same application. I'm sure there's lots of code within oracle or java that gets reused frequently by all the processors. An eightcore chip with 16MB of cache will naturally be able to cache much more of the shared resources than 8 cpu's with 2MB cache.