Sun to launch world's fastest chip

CHENNAI, INDIA: Sun’s global launch of UltraSPARC T2 on August 8 is seen as a big leap in the performance per watt game unleashed by chip vendors in the recent times. Snubbing Intel and AMD, Sun Microsystems has come out with world’s first and fastest processor on its Niagara series named UltraSPARC T2.

This is a major update to its already popular UltraSPARC T1. But in terms of power and performance, Ultra SPARC T2 is all set to create new benchmarks, as it’s the only processor to have eight cores supporting 64-threads on a single chip. What it means is, the new T2 processor can perform 64 tasks at one time and it boasts the industry's highest power efficiency per thread.

According to sources at Sun, the UltraSPARC T2 is the industry's first processor to bring together the key functions of a server system on a single chip—processing, networking, security, floating point units, input/output (I/O), accelerated memory access. It also provides ample computing power for massively threaded operating system, like Solaris. Integrating these elements on a single piece of silicon increases performance, reliability, energy efficiency and cost savings as per Sun.

Marking a shift from its earlier 95nm T1 processor the T2 has reduced form factor as result of its 65nm process thereby enabling Sun to reduce the processor size by 10 per cent.

In an exclusive interaction to CyberMedia News, David Yen, executive vice president of Microelectronics at Sun Microsystems said: “The new UltraSPARC T2 unfolds a new premise in power-performance paradigm, it took three and half years to develop. The UltraSPARC T2 processor doubles the performance of our existing UltraSPARC T1 without increasing the CPU clock frequency or quadrupling its cache sizes.”

The T2 also makes possible a new breed of compact, power-efficient, highly integrated devices—going beyond servers to routers, switches, telecommunications infrastructure, medical imaging, industrial printing and more. With UltraSPARC T2 technology, we can bring the speed and scalability of chip multithreading into much wider use, added Yen.

With energy efficiency seen as critical success factor these days has prompted Sun to integrate its Cool Threads and Chip Multi Threading (CMT) technologies on T2 processor. In terms of power consumption the UltraSPARC T2 is powered by two watts per thread. This is in comparison to a four core Intel Xeon processor, which takes 30 watt per thread and IBM’s Power 6 at 35 watt per thread.

Sun claims that UltraSPARC T2 processor sets the gold standard for green computing and efficiency, combining the industry’s lowest power consumption with double the cores, 16 times the threads, four times the throughput with on-chip network and security functionality. “The UltraSPARC T2 processor has the potential to save customers millions of dollars on skyrocketing power, cooling and space costs in their data centers,” says Yen.

Sun’s new processor comes at a time when Sun is becoming profitable after years of losses. Sun is bullish that UltraSPARC T2 will give it an early mover advantage to penetrate compute intensive multithreaded apps space. Moreover, Sun is gunning for major chunk of share for T2 from data centers which is considered as a prime consumer for a highly energy efficient processor like T2. In terms of availability Sun would be shipping Sun Fire servers powered by the UltraSPARC T2 processor and Solaris 10 in the second half of 2007.

Sun also indicated that it will come with a scaleable version of T2 during that time which is code-named as ‘Victoria Falls. Sun is also working on another high performance Niagara processor called ‘Rock’ that would be launched sometime next year.

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