Slashdot Mirror
New Server Chip Niagara
* * Beatles-Beatles writes "Sun recently announced their latest release in server technology. The UltraSparc T1 processor, code-named Niagara, has eight computing engines on a single chip, with each core capable of handling up to four tasks at once." With this new processor Sun hopes to get a leg up on the competition. The Niagra chip is being billed as an "eco-friendly" chip because of its low power requirements. From the article: " [...] removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees."
What about all the real nasty chemicals that go into the manufacturing process of chips .. eg arsenic and acid !!!
removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc
... exactly where would all these other systems go to? Landfill? Recycling stations/stock piles?
T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1
million trees.
Sales droids. Ugh.
Eight cores at four threads is 32 simultaneous threads. Nice, but what about memory bandwith? Each thread needs proper I/O if this is actually going to do any good... Anyone have any real info on this marchitecture?
.: Max Romantschuk
You need at least a dozen concurrent threads or processes before you can make good use of this CPU's power. Certainly not a good idea for desktops. An excellent match for web servers. Other server-type workloads (e.g. database, file server) may need some tuning to make the best of this architecture.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
In that case the old inefficient systems would still be running, using power, hence no environmental gain.
The only way to get the claimed environmental gain would be if the old systems were never used again - which then does raise the landfill etc. issues
It is not Niagra. Thank you
Right on.
To be pedantic, planting trees (unless it's done on soil that was used for industrial agriculture, which has pretty much giving up its carbon already), will generally cause a release of CO2 from the ground. Even once the forest becomes mature, the net release of CO2 is positive in many cases (especially if the land used to be grassland).
But assuming that is ignored, a million trees:
- Is nothing. Assuming they're Christmas trees, it's about a square kilometre. It's also about 1/100th of the annual harvest in the USA.
- Is meaningless. Tell me in megatonnes of CO2 or gigawatts how much this will save, and if it doesn't equal a megatonne/yr or gigawatt, then it is just a drop in the bucket. Probably less of an effect than eradicating all spyware (thus causing less PCs to be replaced by lazy or ignorant or rich PC owners).
For a lot of uses today, a swarm of processors like this makes more sense than driving one CPU hellishly fast so it can task-switch quick enough to get around to everything.
Sun traditionally has been very good at engineering the interconnects so I expect the actual throughput on this is pretty good.
Will be interesting to see how well this does.
Um, yeah, but given that your two most strenuous processes are using 4% and 2% of your CPU respectively, with your machine posting mighty load averages of 0.33, 0.30, 0.18, I think you can safely hold off on upgrading to an 8-core processor any time soon--unless some of those threads aren't sleeping fast enough for you :-)
The Sparc architecture has always had a problem getting good straight-line performance, because of the way the register windows constrain the compiler by exposing a small register set to the optimiser while still having the large context switch overhead of a large register set. Sun has long used multiple register contexts and microthreading-like techniques supported by the OS to get good multitasking performance despite these shortcomings, so this is a natural extension of the Sparc family.
And, yes, I'm sure straight-line single-processor performance will be nothing exceptional. But don't knock the impact of lower power... if it uses half the power of a comparable dual-core Opteron then you can fit twice as many processors in a rack, just because of the cooling requirements.
I also wonder what "handling up to four tasks at once" means. This could simply mean they have four traditional Sparc register contexts per core. TFA doesn't go into detail there.
Sun has been talking about this puppy for a while now, and it's good to seem them deliver it. It does round out their processor strategy pretty nicely: AMD on the low end, and if you want obscene performance per-CPU at the high end you get this guy. I'll be interested to see some performance numbers.
Typical Sun though: crap-tacular marketing. What's the deal with the "eco-friendly" angle? See Sun's front page. Which CTO's actually care about that again? It's just stupid; saving the planet is a great corporate goal, but hopefully Sun is a bit more concerned with their bottom line, where they haven't consistently made a profit in 5 years.
That G4 is also far less powerful than the Niagra. We're talking about using these chips in servers, not laptops. Server manufacturers do want to reduce power consumption and heat output, but they need a lot more porcessing power than five-year-old laptop chips (such as the G4) can provide. 70W is quite low for a server as most server chips are at least twice as power-hungry as that.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Are people still going on about loggin? Shortsited logging companies huh? And what happens after a logging company clears out part of a forest? The replant the trees? Yes they do which is why we have more trees today in america then we did over 100 years ago.