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: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.