14 DAY TRIAL // After the successful launch and warm market welcome of the latest processor from Sun that is intended as a server workhorse, the company announced that it is working on a new version of the T2 CPU that is aimed at two and four way servers.
According to information released by Sun and cited by the news site vnunet.com, the new T2 version will be codenamed Victoria Falls and the chip will have similar dimensions and power requirements with the older Niagara 2 processor. The main difference is that the new version of the T2 CPU supports two-way and four-way servers, unlike the Niagara 2 processor that is only to be used in single CPU server systems. The Victoria Falls processors will support servers with as many as four sockets and if the similarities with the Niagara 2 CPUs are extended to the internal architecture it may mean that up to 32 programmable computing cores may exist in a four-way server system. Given the fact that up to eight threads can be run simultaneously on every single T2 core, a Victoria Falls servers may be able to run as many as 256 threads at any given time.
While the expansion on the two and four way servers provides an important increase in computing power, a number of problems arise, such as memory management, memory leaks, lock and race conditions and so on. As data can be stored either inside the cache memory on the CPU die or in the system main memory and even in other's processor cache, performance will degrade as the chip is forced to wait for the transfer to complete. Sun plans to address this issue by building links between all processors and the two way Victoria Falls chips will feature "embedded coherence hubs" that will allow data to pass at a rate of 65Gbps, while the four way design that implements more hubs will achieve a double data transferring rate.
Sun claims that a two-way server system equipped with the Victoria Falls processors will reach performances of 180 percent when compared to systems built around a single processing unit, while a Java Business benchmark registered between 182 and 192 percent increase. The Victoria Falls processors are expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2008.