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Multithreading - What's it Mean to Developers?

Posted by Hemos on from the the-power-of-the-sun dept.

sysadmn writes "Yet another reason not to count Sun out: Chip Multithreading. CMT, as Sun calls it, is the use of hardware to assist in the execution of multiple simultaneous tasks - even on a single processor. This excellent tutorial on Sun's Developer site explains the technology, and why throughput has become more important than absolute speed in the enterprise. From the intro: Chip multi-threading (CMT) brings to hardware the concept of multi-threading, similar to software multi-threading. ... A CMT-enabled processor, similar to software multi-threading, executes many software threads simultaneously within a processor on cores. So in a system with CMT processors, software threads can be executed simultaneously within one processor or across many processors. Executing software threads simultaneously within a single processor increases a processor's efficiency as wait latencies are minimized. "

1 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. This is just Multi-core processing... by mzito · · Score: 5, Interesting

    CMT is nothing more than multi-core processors. Sun is using the marketing idea of CMT to hide the fact that the UltraSparc IV is nothing more than two UltraSparc III cores on one chip.

    One way to look at this is Sun maximizing their existing engineering efforts. However, by marketing it as some revolutionary feature advance, they're implying that they've done something new and exciting, as opposed to something that IBM is already doing and AMD and Intel are working on.

    Beyond that, Sun and Fujitsu have a co-manufacturing and R&D deal now, confirming something those in the enterprise space have been saying for a long time - Fujitsu was making better Sun servers than Sun.

    Plus Sun killed plans for the UltraSparc V, leaving only the Niagra. They have the Opteron line pushing up from below, and rapidly evaporating sales at the high end. They're resorting to marketing gibberish to add new features to the product line, while simultaneously offloading R&D and manufacturing to a partner.

    Remind me again why Sun is in the hardware business?

    Thanks,
    Matt

    --
    me@mzi.to