And you thought Intel had powerful processors

Jul 28, 2007 08:31 GMT  ·  By

Apart form being the major Java language developer and maintainer, Sun Microsystems has a stake in computer hardware as well. Their computer architecture is not x86 compatible as it is designed to use the SPARC and UltraSPARC chips. The latest supercomputers from Sun, named generically Niagara and Rock are very impressive and according to Sun they should be able to smash all competition.

The Niagara based servers, now at the second generation, received the official names T5120 and T5220 and customers will be able to buy them in 1U and 2U configurations, each of them having a Niagara II or more exactly, an UltraSPARC T2. The T2 chip will probably run at a clock frequency of 1.5GHz and it will have an eight core, 64-thread architecture. The next release of the operating system Solaris, codenamed Nevada, will include direct support for the "Niagara III, aka Victoria Falls, aka Niagara II+" according to the Web based news site The Register. "Sun has planned a pair of NiagaraII+ boxes code-named Maramba and formally named the T5140 (1U) and T5240 (2U)".

The Niagara II chip is due to be launched any day now and according to its producer, Sun Microsystems, it will feature an impressive increase in the department of floating point performance, because it has a math processing unit in each of its cores, unlike the more traditional architecture found in the Niagara I chip, where we have just one math processing unit for the entire chip. The Niagara III computer chips will be aimed at multi processor server boxes and they will feature an impressive 128-thread capability. Also, the Nevada version of the operating system Solaris will include support for 256 cores, with an option to use as many of 2048 cores. It is yet unclear if Sun refers to hardware cores or simply to threads.

Sun Microsystems also released a description of four socket server boxes with support for as many as 64 threads per processor that sounds very much like the Rock architecture, due to come out "at the end of next year", that "will have 16 cores and support 32 threads".