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Hardware Sun Unveils Details of "Niagara II"
Anh Tuan Huynh (Blog) - August 24, 2006 3:46 AM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 7 comment(s) - last by laxxity.. on Aug 24 at 5:48 PM
New Sun processor details confirmed at Hot Chips 18

The Register reports Sun has confirmed details of its upcoming Niagara II processor via a presentation leaked earlier today. The presentation was presented today at the Hot Chips 18 conference at around 4:30pm PST. Sun’s new Niagara II chip is the second multi-core offering set to join the current multi-core UltraSPARC T1. Confirmed specifications of Niagara II include the ability to execute up to 64 simultaneous threads and one floating-point unit per core.

Niagara II processors will ship with eight cores that all share a single 4MB pool of L2 cache. It will also have a very short eight-stage pipeline and 12-stage FPU pipeline. FBDIMM memory is supported with four dual channel memory controllers for an insane amount of memory bandwidth. PCI Express will also be supported with Niagara II processors too.

Niagara II processors are expected to arrive in mid-2007 at 1.4 GHz. 1U and 2U systems are expected. There’s no mention on pricing of Niagara II processors or systems yet.  The previous Niagara core is now known as Sun's UltraSPARC T1 processor -- a chip capable of containing eight physical cores per die, with each core executing up to four threads simultaneously.

In 2008 Sun is expected to announce a offset to the T1 series lineup, currently dubbed Rock.  When the 65nm Rock hits the streets, it is expected to utilize at least 32 threads per core.

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Cache bound?
By Hypernova on 8/24/2006 4:42:39 AM , Rating: 2
Doesn't 4MB across 64 thread sounds a little too small?.




RE: Cache bound?
By mlau on 8/24/2006 8:05:44 AM , Rating: 3
It'll probably get most performance when it is "streaming"
tons of data to and from memory. Cache is therefore not really
of much use.


RE: Cache bound?
By feelingshorter on 8/24/2006 11:31:32 AM , Rating: 2
Thats right. The last time i saw benchmarks of these Sun servers on anandtech, they performed much better than anything from Intel and AMD.


RE: Cache bound?
By andrep74 on 8/24/2006 11:44:28 AM , Rating: 2
These processors are mostly designed for simultaneous processing of separate instances, such as serving Web pages at insane numbers of requests per second; these requests tend to be similar, or utilize a relatively small core of common libraries.


Error in text
By vortmax on 8/24/2006 11:31:59 AM , Rating: 2
"...set to join the current multi-car UltraSPARC T1."

Should be multi-CORE....




RE: Error in text
By wiiz3rd on 8/24/2006 12:29:55 PM , Rating: 2
Shouldn't it be multi-car model T.


high end
By laxxity on 8/24/2006 5:48:40 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
"In 2008 Sun is expected to announce a successor to the T1 series lineup, currently dubbed Rock. Rock is designed for "lower" scale systems, with less than eight sockets.s than eight sockets."

Rock is not the successor to Niagra, it is a totally different product line and it is intended to fit into Sun's "high-end" scalable SMP systems.




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