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Sun Microsystems is expected to announce faster UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"
servers Thursday along with a firmer launch date for higher-end
"Rock"-based models.
Current T1000 and T2000 servers
use 1GHz or 1.2GHz processors, but the new models' chips run at 1.4GHz.
In addition, the maximum memory has been increased to 64GB from 32GB,
which in combination with the faster chips mean overall performance
increases 30 percent, said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for
multicore Sparc technology.
Sun Microsystems is expected to announce faster UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"
servers Thursday along with a firmer launch date for higher-end
"Rock"-based models.
Current T1000 and T2000 servers
use 1GHz or 1.2GHz processors, but the new models' chips run at 1.4GHz.
In addition, the maximum memory has been increased to 64GB from 32GB,
which in combination with the faster chips mean overall performance
increases 30 percent, said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for
multicore Sparc technology.
A high-end Niagara T2000 system with a 1.2GHz processor and 64GB of
memory costs about $68,000, but moving to the 1.4GHz processor
increases the price to $85,000, according to Sun's store.
Sun's Niagara servers, along with the "Galaxy" line of x86 servers, are the two central features of Sun's effort to reclaim its relevance, profits and server market share.
Sun is trying to reinvigorate its Sparc processor line, though, with
chips that aggressively embrace the multicore technology to squeeze
multiple processing engines on one slice of silicon. Niagara has eight
cores, each able to simultaneously execute four independent instruction
sequences called threads, and Niagara II servers due in the second half
of 2007 will support eight threads per core.
Niagara systems are geared for relatively low-end jobs where it's more
important how many jobs can be accomplished at the same time than the
absolute speed from start to finish of one particular job. In the
second half of 2008, Sun plans to release servers based on its "Rock" chip, a high-end 16-core cousin to Niagara that's geared to execute threads fast as well as in profusion.
The Rock chip taped out on January 3, Azhari said, referring to the
design completion milestone. (The term "tapeout" derives from the
olden-day practice of shipping a chip design on magnetic tape from the
engineers to the chip manufacturer.) Because the tapeout slipped into
2007, engineers lost an internal contest and therefore had to wear
ties, briefly, Azhari said.
In addition, Sun announced "Neptune," a new custom processor to
boost networking for its multicore machines. The chip is designed for
network cards that will more gracefully link the multicore Sparc or x86
chips with multiple 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet connections.
Read the original article: http://news.com.com/Sun+speeds+Niagara+servers/2100-1010_3-6151001.html
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