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."

Comments

nasty stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all the real nasty chemicals that go into the manufacturing process of chips .. eg arsenic and acid !!!

Re:nasty stuff

[wytcld]

Chips will be manufactured anyway. The question is what the useful lifetime of the chips that are manufactured is, and what the power consumption of those chips over their lifetime will be, in ratio to the work they perform.

Sparc's strength in the early Internet days was always throughput - even under load - rather than speed. Sun also built more reliable hardware. I switched from Sun to AMD/Linux for Webservers early on, but with energy costs rising quickly, I'll be taking another look at Sun. Where these probably can matter most is for large Web farms, which currently tend to be commodity Linux boxen. But those are throw-away machines - chips headed onward to the landfill after just a couple years.

Re:nasty stuff

[moro_666]

indeed, you have acid's all over the place.

alcohol is acid, quite a weak one, but still having the effects and reactions as the rest of acids have.
most of the batteries that you throw into your ipod contain acid, so does the battery in your car.
if you let CO2 and water together, they create a nice (and a bit unstable) carbonic acid, and that is basically all over the place.
even your body contains so many acids that i would get a ban on slashdot for even naming all of these.
compared to the acids created by gasoline engines and powerstations in the atmosphere, the electionics production isn't even worth mentioning.

sun is making the right move, more computing power for less watt-per-hour, and if they can spare the energy used during producing too, it's even better (and more profitable for them, since they pay for that). having a 200W P4 screaming under your table just to play solitaire is really wicked from the energetic point of view. so is driving an engine overbloated suv just to get one fat butt from one place to another. regular swedish buses that carry 30 people have the same size of engines as hummers or corvettes, sniffing the word 'wasted' anywhere ?

while this cpu will be nogood for playing doom3, it will be a very good chip for handling many many many threads'n'processes at once and therefor be ideal for running webservers and mailservers and other type of multiple client handling services. way to go sun, i hope amd will do an amd athlon 64 X32 some time soon too :)

too bad i can't afford this stuff anytime soon :(

sadly when you are interested in the price of the latest server, you're not rich enough to buy it

What about I/O?

[Max Romantschuk]

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?

Not appropriate for all types of workloads

[XNormal]

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.

Re:So that's no effect at all, then

[Yartrebo]

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).

Re:raw power

[rkhalloran]

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.

Re: appropriate for all types of workloads

[LeninZhiv]

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 :-)