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."

Comments

Regurgitating "Quad" market speak

[Eukariote]

Along with having more cores than the quads from Intel and AMD...

What quad from Intel/AMD? Intel is selling two dual cores on a cracker. The "quad" bit is just marketing, the actual silicon chips are pure dual core designs that have to talk across the front side bus just as in a two-socket server. And AMD has so far only been previewing their quads, you can't buy them yet.

Re:on-chip 10G Ethernet ports

[Cheesey]

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.

Re:Trust me...

[LarsWestergren]

...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.

Not going to be the fastest, but...

[zeromemory]

Sun donated one of the original T2000 (based on the original 8-core 4-thread/core Niagara processor) systems to a campus organization where I'm a volunteer system administrator, so think I have quite a bit of experience with this processor. Here's my take on the Niagara2, based upon my experiences with the Niagara1:

• No, this processor is not going to be the 'fastest' processor out there; this processor is designed primarily for workloads that don't require floating-point calculations (web servers, mail, etc), so it's not going to be the go-to processor for places like rendering farms. In fact, float-point performance on the Niagara1 was so terrible that Sun included a special cryptographic accelerator to help with SSL performance (the primary consumer of floating-point calculations on most web servers).
• This processor architecture absolutely rocks for the purpose it was intended, though. It consumes very little power, but handles service loads amazingly well. We also have a Sun v40z (8-core Opteron server) that would barely be able to keep up with the our T2000 (that's saying a lot), and our T2000 consumes only a little more than half as much power going into our v40z (2.6A @ 120VAC compared to 4.6A @ 120VAC).
• The inclusion of 10GbE support is going to be absolutely essential and will help make servers based upon the Niagara2 stand-out compared to servers from competing vendors. Why is 10GbE so important? I mean, we already have GbE, and most places barely have an infrastructure for that in place, right? The answer is SAN. 10GbE is going to be necessary if you're going to be using iSCSI to consolidate storage and deliver reasonable performance, and most places are heading in that direction, especially the target market for these systems.
• Solaris Logical Domains (not to be confused with Sun Containers or Zones) is a hardware-based virtualization technology that was packaged with the Niagara1 and will probably be included with the Niagara2. Using Logical Domains, you can create independent virtual servers running different operating systems and divide hardware resources up between them, down to the individual CPU thread and PCI Express bus leaf level. Unlike software virtualization solutions, all your virtual servers are never dependent on any single virtual server (global zone, dom0, etc). This technology is making hardware virtualization a possibility for many places.

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.

Re:Not going to be the fastest, but...

[Alioth]

The floating point performance of the new processor should be like night and day compared to the old one you had: the old one apparently only has 1 FPU for the entire device - the new one has an FPU per core.

Re:Trust me...

[TheRaven64]

If they used these a bit more aggressively - such as using them as a graphics processor on a PC - they'd be getting some amazing press A modern GPU is fairly similar in design to the T2, but there are a few key differences:

• 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.