Chips Can Handle More Instructions At the Same Time

Sun Microsystems Inc. is announcing a big jump in the performance of its small server systems, the latest example of a trend to push computer chips to do many jobs at once.

The company says the new servers can simultaneously carry out up to 128 computing instructions, known as threads. Not all programs can take advantage of such "multithreaded" chips, but some customers are reporting impressive results.

One is IT.com, a Washington company that specializes in technology for sifting through email and other documents for purposes such as discovering litigation evidence. Jason Pratt, the company's chief information officer, said it was running into roadblocks trying to efficiently process large volumes of messages to prepare them for searches using conventional servers.

Using one of Sun's new servers, however, IT.com was able to process about 50 gigabytes of data an hour -- compared with four to seven gigabytes using conventional machines -- without any changes to its software. "It's just incredible," said Mark Cordover, the company's founder and chief executive.

Companies are using several technologies to do more computing jobs in parallel. One technology puts the core circuitry of multiple calculating engines on each piece of silicon, creating what are called multicore chips. Multithreading technology allows each processor core to do multiple tasks at the same time.

Sun uses both techniques in a line of chips, code-named Niagara, that are a variant of its internally developed Sparc microprocessor line. The company developed a second generation in the family, which features eight processors that each can execute eight threads simultaneously, or 64 instructions in all.

With the new servers, the company has added capability for two of the 64-thread chips to work almost as if they were a single chip, said John Fowler, the executive vice president in charge of Sun's computer-systems unit. Two models being unveiled, priced at $14,995 and $17,995, each have two of the chips, which are called UltraSparc T2 Plus.

Richard Partridge, an analyst at the research firm Ideas International, said early Niagara systems were good at jobs such as managing Web sites. But Sun has added modifications to make the chips better suited for other jobs, like running databases -- and the company needs to educate its customers about those applications, Mr. Partridge said.

The Niagara family is a departure from a long-term shift of many computing jobs to chips from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., based on a design called x86 that started in personal computers. Another approach, typified by rival International Business Machines Corp., is to increase the clock speed of chips, a measure of the timing pulses that coordinate computing activity. IBM's Power6 chips operate at more than five gigahertz, compared with 1.4 gigahertz for Sun's Niagara chips.

Read the original article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120771020704900759.html

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