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Sun To Release 8-Core Niagara 2 Processor
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems is set to announce its eight-core Niagara 2 processor next week. Each core supports eight threads, so the chip handles 64 simultaneous threads, making it the centerpiece of Sun's "Throughput Computing" effort. Along with having more cores than the quads from Intel and AMD, the Niagara 2 have dual, on-chip 10G Ethernet ports with cryptographic capability. Sun doesn't get much processor press, because the chips are used only in its own CoolThreads servers, but Niagara 2 will probably be the fastest processor out there when it's released, other than perhaps the also little-known 4-GHz IBM Power 6."
Correct. At my last employer we found this out the hard way. Most servers were getting great performance but the one that actually did some (and it wasn't much really) FP work was horrible. This should really remedy that problem.
On the other hand, SUN still suffers from the fact that ETCA is getting more and more mindshare in the telco arena which has been one of their major cash cows. It will be real interesting to see how that pans out in the end.
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
High-speed CPUs are all limited by a bottleneck - getting data on and off chip. Putting the Ethernet controllers on chip helps to offset this.
In the future, it is likely that all the wired buses in your motherboard will be replaced by an internal Ethernet-like network. We are already seeing a trend towards simpler and faster interconnects such as SATA. The next step is to use Ethernet-style connections for every chip-to-chip link, and within the chips themselves too. If this seems unlikely, consider that your PCs memory bus already is basically a network connection. The device at one end (CPU) is in a different clock domain to the device at the other (memory). Data is sent in packets (called bursts) to offset the latency of setting up a transfer.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
...If they put THESE under the GPL, along with the T1, they'd be getting more press than they could imagine.
http://www.opensparc.net/
They are openly discussing making the Niagara 2 available as open source as well, but note that there are some roadblocks such as the US government's restrictions on crypto technology.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I think the Niagara is a pretty solid design, but it's not the processor to end all processors. For service workloads, I don't think you can get a better processor, but you probably don't want one of these processors in your workstation. Sun Microsystems is also headed in the right direction, establishing an open-community around these processors and Solaris.
I'm Trappped at Berkeley.
- The T2 is mainly focussed on integer ops with only one floating point pipeline per core. A GPU typically is close to 100% floating point pipelines, and doesn't bother with integer arithmetic.
- The T2 uses multiple contexts to hide memory latency, mostly caused by incorrectly predicted branches. A GPU typically doesn't bother much with branch prediction, since it runs code that is very light on conditional branches (on average, branches happen every 7 ops in general purpose code. In GPU code, they happen every few hundred).
- GPUs usually focus on 4-way vector instructions, since most of their data is of this form (RGBA colours, XYZW vertexes). The T2 only has scalar instructions.
I posted in my journal recently suggesting that it would be easier to produce a modern GPU than an older card, since modern GPUs have much less application-specific logic and do more in software, relying on just having lots of cores / pipelines to give speed.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You're looking for the Open Graphics Project. But hardware is hard to design and expensive to fab, you're not going to get an Xtreme3D Graphics Accelerator competitive with the latest from NVIDIA or ATI.