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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."
...If they put THESE under the GPL, along with the T1, they'd be getting more press than they could imagine. 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. If they keep them locked in a server closet, it's only then that nobody will care.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This processor will also have a floating-point unit for each core, unlike the UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) which only had one shared amongst all 8 cores. This should make it much more suitable than the T1 for a wide variety of applications. The T1 did great on multithreaded server-type tasks (e.g web, email, database) but would have been pretty hopeless for anything doing more than a bare minimum of FP work.
Yes, but will it run Vista?
I like it. In my work with high performance computers, a significant limiting factor in a lot of our tasks was the interprocessor bandwidth. The Niagra2 has a crossbar, with a huge amount of bandwidth available between the different cores and their L2 caches.
I'd like to see some benchmarks, and more technical specs, on these babies.
(nt)
customers just want to fit 4 cores in one socket. That's all that matters. That you can get a 1U with two sockets and put 8 intel cores in it under under $2k is a big deal right now.
That said I've always wanted to get my hands on some of these new multicore UltraSparcs. I think they have a lot of potential, and the new ones seem extremely powerful.
Now if only Sun would but the low end one in a mac mini form factor and sell it as a java developers kit then maybe I could play with one. The low end sun fires are something I could almost afford, but I don't really want to keep a 1u on my desk just to try out the technology.
I think the big 64-bit address space and the ability to run lots of threads seems to fit well with Sun's Java. Not that I am a Java developer, I just think it's a good match, and it seems to be that's why people were using the older CoolThreads systems, enterprise Java.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... will a beowulf cluster of these run linux, or blend?
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Am I the only person who read the headline as "Sun to Release 8-Core Viagra 2 Processor"?
With all due respect mate, you don't have a clue. We, like most other financial companies in the world, buy Sun/IBM P5/HPUX/etc stuff because it is *cheap*... seriously, compared to the mainframes that handle the real back end, these babies are practically free.
Also, if the last thing you have touched is a V440 then you are not exactly up to speed with the cutting edge of Sun products. I promise you that if you had actually ever seen a system running a T1 chip you would not say "their processor division has been kinda lagging". The cool threads stuff is amazing and they are the only people doing anything quite like it. I am not sure if you picked this up from the article but with one chip you get _64_ hardware based threads.
In our internal benchmarks a £20k T2000 with 1 x 8 core T1 outperformed a £100k+ V880 with 8 x 2 core Sparc. Freakin' cool and excellent value for money. Plus all this fits in two rack units.
Working in small companies is nice but I promise you that out there in the big wide world "most" companies don't think that $US20k is very much at all to spend on a system that will be part of a critical service.
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?
"Ok well for that price, we can literally buy a new fairly high performance server from someone like Dell or Gateway (with a 3 year warranty)."
It's all realative. Your 'high performance' Dell or Gateway wouldn't do much other then run bind at one of our locations. You are comparing apples to oranges. These systems are not for you to surf the net with, and as for price, well there is a lot to be gained from stability. I still have sparc systems with OEM (minus the disks) that are close to 20 years old running at some locations. Bet your Dell can't say that.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
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.
Niagara? I don't want to know what happens when one of these has to compute an integer overflow, do I?
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
can it blend? - yes I'm sure it can, the iphone blended.
speaking of which how much does this processor cost, and why doesn't Sun Microsystems make laptops, I was looking for Unix machines recently and I decided to go with the Mac book pro, rather than the Linux machines (laptops) at Dell, because of the hardware and general lack of processing power, which doesn't seem to lend itself to virtualizing other Operating systems.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
They do. Ultra 3 Mobile.
There are also the units from Tadpole, and I'm sure others
A few points.
1) Sun is not trying to win the hearts and minds of home users - that is not their market. Sun would see few benefits from pushing their products in the mainstream media. Trade press is where they reach the decision makers. How many Oracle adverts do you see in game magazines and tabloid newspapers? Not very many, they tend to advertise in business oriented outlets such as The Economist.
2) Some small businesses don't care about computers at all. The companies that need Sun will buy Sun. The companies who can run their business out of a box of post-it notes will do the former.
3) When you buy mission critical hardware, you don't look for a '3 year warranty'. You look for a service and support contract based on how critical the hardware is to your business. If you can run your business on a home-made 486dx system running Minix then that is probably the best option.
4) Sun being worth 10% of Intel is irrelevant. The Economist sells far fewer copies than The Sun (a pretty terrible UK tabloid) but I know which one I'd chose for a serious overview of world news.
5) This is a techie web site so news like this seems pretty relevant here, even if most of us can't afford to buy the kit.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
I'm going to have to agree with the coward on this one. You don't have a clue. You won't see Sun stuff on the desktops. Sun boxes have their place: The high-performance market. Where I work (hint: Feds), we have multiple Sun boxes set up, which run our virtual servers. If there's one thing that you can never get enough of in this kind of setup, it's multiple threading and RAM. The integrated networking is also a huge boost, since that's the last major bottleneck before hitting the clients.
He wasn't trying to say that Sun deserves more press. Sure, small businesses and even many large businesses don't require that kind of power. But the coward was right: Sun provides good quality at (relatively) dirt cheap prices. Hence why they make this kind of thing.
You try running 5+ heavily used virtual servers (Each running a component of Oracle) on one Intel or AMD box. Let me know how that goes for you.
PS - Solaris kicks ass.
If you were a real grammar nazi, you'd be able to point out all the other errors I made. I demand to see your badge!
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Rock and T2 look very promising, but before that their processor division was lagging so badly they were putting re-badged Fujitsu chips in their high-end machines to try to stay competitive. Between the end of the dot-com era to the release of the T1, Sun's microprocessor division seemed like dead weight. They made a huge gamble to start designing web app optimised chips as the bubble was bursting, and it looks like it will end up paying off, but it comes at the end of a period where 'lagging' is a very polite way of describing their performance.
By the way, there seem to be a lot of low-power SPARC variants, but I've never seen a palmtop form-factor device containing one. Do they exist? I'd be very interested in one, since SPARC, even SPARC32, is a lot better supported than ARM, in spite of the latter's ubiquity.
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Linspire (back in the day - I've been on Ubuntu for quite a while now) worked this way. IIRC you had to hold down a key to rescan for hardware, otherwise it assumed nothing changed and booted very briskly. I'm surprised it didn't catch on with more popular distros.
Also, I thought http://www.linuxbios.org/Welcome_to_LinuxBIOS would get through POST and to the payload in just a couple of seconds.
Only one silly meme per customer please.
The quads from Intel provide four physical cores per socket. That is the definition of a quad in this context. The exact workings of how many bits of silicon there are, how they talk to each other and to the rest of the system is, to 99.999% of users and computer buyers, background fluff.
This was the same as when Intel put two single-core chips into a package to release a 'dual core'. Lots of people like you jumped up and down and pointed out it wan't *real* dual core, and how the FSB issue would cripple performance. Amazingly, it wasn't the case - they sold in droves, and real-world performance was good enough to carry Intel through to the 'true' dual core, the Core 2 Duo.
If the competition had anything out that was the same cost and performed significantly better than the 'fake' quad cores, you would have an argument. But they haven't and you don't. Bear in mind I'm talking about the huge x86/x64 market, not the relatively low volume non-x86 server market.
What Intel did back then and again now is perfectly sensible. They have millions of high yield, robust dual core chips being churned out, and they have built into the infrastructure the ability to put two into a package, lower the speed a bit to drop the per-core heat output, and sell reasonably priced (now) quad core chips. When the drop to 45nm happens, they will release their 'real' quad cores, and pretty quickly put two of those into a package to start selling oct-core (whatever we're going to call them). And so it goes.
What's the alternative? Not sell quads until 45nm comes out? Not working out too well for AMD is it? I've asked the question before here and on realworldtech.com - at what point will the FSB problem actually become a painful problem for the Intel chips? Well, not yet (4 core) is the answer, despite dire predictions from the AMD camp for years. My gues is that, shock of shocks, Intel have actually thought it through - and that's why CSI is coming. When the number of cores gets to the point where FSB will actually hurt performance relative to the AMD architecture, that's when CSI will kick in. Maybe at 8 cores, maybe at 16.
What, you don't need quad core yet? Fine, stop your bitching and choose what's right for you. Vive la difference, and 3 cheers for a market that gives us the choice.
"Do No Evil"
It's like it's 1999 all-over again, except this time Sun actually has revenue in-line with expectations. I continue to maintain Sun is this century's Bell Labs and Xerox PARC all rolled into one.
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While I'm sure your 20k T1 outperformed your 100k v880. It does not show that the T1 is a better choice than an Intel/AMD system.
Sun's stuff are slower than IBM's POWER line, and they are nowhere in the same league as IBM mainframes, and IBM mainframes are not in the same league as real nonstop computing clusters.
Mainframes = very good uptimes, but you have _scheduled_ downtimes.
Stuff like OpenVMS or Tandem = uptimes of _decades_ possible, don't even need scheduled downtimes where you turn everything off, you can run while replacing the hardware. With the Tandem stuff you even have CPUs running the same thing at the same time for real redundancy. Only thing is HP seems to be burying VMS and Tandem.
Sun? They didn't even have hardware instruction retry till Fujitsu SPARC. For many years it was pretty embarassing that the really high end SPARCs were Fujitsu rather than Sun - the fastest SPARC systems till just a few years ago were all Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER (I haven't bothered checking recently, the last I recall Sun started using Fujitsu stuff for their high end systems).
Sun got where they were by making relatively cheap Unix RISC workstations and they provided servers for areas where reliability and availability didn't really matter as much as the real "high end" stuff. They caught the internet wave for "cheap" webservers etc and made a lot of money then.
The problem now with Sun is, they get blasted at the low end by x86, and at the high end they pale in comparison to IBM's stuff.
For "normal" webserver/db/internet/corporate stuff it's x86.
In the HPC arena it's x86 (for scale out), and IBM (for scale up).
So where does Sun fit?
Just go google for benchmarks of T1 vs Intel vs AMD. The T1 doesn't even do that well for performance/power consumption when compared to the Intel woodcrest CPU: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2772
For Sun's sake, their Niagara 2 better be magnitudes much better than their T1, if not it'll be out of date even before it's released.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be happy if Sun succeeds, but they've fallen way behind.
They sent me a Sunfire last year telling me it had capabilities it didn't. I sent it back. If $21,500 is the price tag, then this would outperform what I was considering at approximately the same price. I doubt these have the capabilities I was looking for, (I want Windows in Xen) but the price isn't going to be it's limiting factor.
By the way, if they're still running it, the Try and Buy program is every bit as good as it sounds. They shipped me a server for the asking, I tested it, and sent it back, all on their dime (except my time.) If I'd talked to salespeople honest enough to say "I don't know" rather than "of course" I wouldn't have had it sent in the first place and might be running one of their servers right now. Maybe next year.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Don't get me wrong. Most of a large financial house doesn't need a Sun server. However, those who do (e.g. quants) really do. Same goes for government, biotech, military contractors, etc.
Each core supports eight threads, so the chip handles 64 simultaneous threads, making it the centerpiece of Sun's "Throughput Computing" effort.
Wow! Only 64 threads, eh? That's the problem with threads, you can't have too many of them because switching from one thread to another is very expensive, cycle-wise. In other words, as long as threads remain the only multitasking mechanism used by the computer industry, super fast, fine-grained multiprocessing will remain a dream. It gets worse. There is another problem with threads that is even worse than this. Threads are inherently asynchronous. Until and unless the computer industry comes to its senses and realizes that asynchronous processing makes it impossible to implement programs with deterministic timing, we will continue to pay the heavy price of software unreliability. Switch to a non-algorithmic, signal-based, synchronous software model (with the supporting CPU architecture), and the problem will disappear. Threads suck! Period. One man's opinion.
Quite true. For more info on the way its cores work, see the UltraSPARC T1 article on Wikipedia (which I have edited quite a bit). Each core is a barrel processor, meaning each stage in the pipeline is handling an instruction from a different thread. This adds complexity, but in exchange it means that branch mis-prediction is no longer a problem - any branch instruction has already been through the execute stage and the Program Counter modified before the next instruction of the thread gets fetched.
The other big advantage with the multi-threaded UltraSPARC T1/T2 design is that it has high throughput. While a single-threaded CPU has to wait on cache misses, the T1/T2 just continues chugging along with its remaining threads. It's switching threads on every clock cycle, so each thread gets only 1/8th of the 'power' of each core. But because it's doing something on every single clock cycle, it can do a lot of work - as long as the work is multi-threaded. That's its weakness.