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Sun Microsystems
hosted its day-long analyst summit meeting in San Francisco yesterday,
and the event was a lot less glum than it has been in prior years now
that the company's new management is seeing some market traction and
financial results on its hardware products and open source software
strategies. There was not a lot of news at the meeting, but Sun did
talk a little bit about roadmaps, and divulged the details of a future
Sparc T1 processor that many suspected was in the works.
Sun Microsystems
hosted its day-long analyst summit meeting in San Francisco yesterday,
and the event was a lot less glum than it has been in prior years now
that the company's new management is seeing some market traction and
financial results on its hardware products and open source software
strategies. There was not a lot of news at the meeting, but Sun did
talk a little bit about roadmaps, and divulged the details of a future
Sparc T1 processor that many suspected was in the works.
That particular processor, code-named "Victoria Falls," is a kicker to
the "Niagara" line of multicored, low-powered Sparc T1 chips that have
been part of Sun's resurgence in the server space. The Niagara chips
are very efficient processors that have eight four-threaded Sparc cores
(based roughly on the UltraSparc-II core) that have been rejiggered to
be very efficient at running multithreaded applications. The Niagara
design allows the 32 threads in the chip to run at an aggregate of
about 75 percent efficiency, which is a lot higher than chips with big
instruction pipes and higher clock speeds (such as Sun's own
UltraSparc-III and UltraSparc-IV processors). Because of this, a single
Niagara chip can do the work of a dual-core processor running at twice
the clock speed or more, and do so within a 75-watt thermal design
point (TDP).
The Victoria Falls chip, which is so named because Victoria Falls in
Africa (between Zimbabwe and Zambia) is much larger than Niagara Falls
(which separates the United States and Canada), will be available in
future Sun Fire servers sometime in the first half of 2008, according
to a presentation given by John Fowler, executive vice president of
systems at Sun. The Victoria Falls processor probably be called the
Sparc T2 and has been referred to in the rumor mill as the Niagara-3
chip up to now. The "two" in T2 would stand for the number of chips
that can be glommed together, given that Victoria Falls, unlike
Niagara, has the clustering electronics on the chip to support shared
main memory and coherent cache memories across two processors. Sun
could use either SMP or NUMA clustering to accomplish this, or some
hybrid variant based on its own interconnect. The latter is the
expectation, but Sun could graft HyperTransport NUMA links onto the
chips, too.
The Victoria Falls chip taped out in October 2006, and Sun's foundry partner, Texas Instruments, has returned samples to Sun, which has put them into alpha systems for design and testing.
As we reported last October,
when Sun had taped out the Niagara-2 kicker to the current Sparc T1
chip, the Niagara-2 chip would move from the eight cores and 32 threads
of the Niagara-1 chip to eight cores and 64 threads, with a floating
point unit added to each core as well with the Niagara-2 design.
Measured against an unspecific metric that Sun calls "throughput," the
Niagara-2 chip is expected to deliver about 2.5 times the performance
of the initial Niagara-1 chips, and 35 times the performance of the
stripped-down UltraSparc-IIIi single-core processors that were used in
Sun's entry servers and workstations a few years ago (and which are
still sold in systems today). By putting two Niagara-2 cores in a
single system with the Victoria Falls design, Sun will be able to offer
entry Sparc servers that have about 4.6 times the performance (again,
that is throughput, not a particular industry-standard benchmark). The
Victoria Falls systems are expected to have about 65 percent more oomph
than the Niagara-2 servers. Victoria Falls chips will appear in
rack-mounted servers and blade servers.
The Niagara-2 chips taped out in April 2006, and are expected to appear
in Sun Fire servers in the second half of 2006.
Also in the second half of 2007, Fowler said, Sun will launch its
next-generation of "Galaxy" X64 servers. He also explained that the Sun
and partner Fujitsu
would get the so-called Advanced Product Line, or APL, servers to
market in the first half of this year. The APL machines are based on
the "Olympus" Sparc64-VI processors and their related "Jupiter" server
frames, and are essentially the servers that Fujitsu had planned to
bring to market to compete against Sun in 2006. But in June 2004, when
Sun was on the financial ropes and its own UltraSparc processor
development was shifting gears toward the Niagara and Rock processors
and its dual-core monolithic UltraSparc-IV chips were delayed, the two
companies decided, in essence, that Sun would use the Olympus chips and
the Jupiter servers as a stop-gap until the Rock processors and their
Supernova servers.
Fowler said that the APL systems will offer about 1.5 times the
performance of the current Sun Fire Sparc machines, which use the
"Panther" UltraSparc-IV+ processors. This is a considerable performance
boost--and one that would have been more dramatic if the APL machines
had shipped in late 2005 or early 2006, as Fujitsu had originally
planned, or in mid-2006, when Sun and Fujitsu were expecting to get the
machines out after they announced their partnership in mid-2004.
The Sparc64 VI processors have two cores, each with two threads, for a
total of four threads per socket, and is expected to run at around 2.4
GHz; the Jupiter server is expected to top out at 64 sockets, or 256
threads. The biggest Sun Fire box today using UltraSparc-IV+ processors
has 72 processors, 144 threads, and runs at 1.8 GHz. If you multiply
threads by clock speed and divide the Olympus numbers by the
UltraSparc-IV+ numbers, you would expect to see a performance boost of
around 2.4 times moving from Sun Fire to APL machines. This might mean
Fujitsu has had to cut back on the clock speed in the Sparc64 VI
processors to get them out the door. Fujitsu and Sun have said very
little about the APL products--even when asked to.
On workloads where applications are highly threaded, top-end Supernova
machines based on the Rock Sparc variant are expected to deliver more
than 10 times the performance of the APL machine and about 16 times of
that of the current UltraSparc-IV+ machines using the 1.8 GHz
processors. That gives the APL boxes a very narrow appeal in terms of
time--four, five, or six quarters, depending on when APL and Supernova
machines actually ship--and performance. Fowler reiterated that servers
using the Rock processors would debut in the second half of 2008. The
16-core Rock processors will probably gang up into machines using
uniboard designs like past Sun Fire machines, with two through eight
chips in a box, which works out to 32 to 128 cores. If the Rock has at
least two threads, that works out to the magic top-end of 256 threads
in the largest machine.
Read the original article: http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn020707-story02.html
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