Sun Announces New UltraSPARC T2 as "World's Fastest Microprocessor"

[Daniel ~]

Written by Daniel
Wednesday, 08 August 2007

Marcus Yam (Blog) - August 7, 2007 10:04 AM DailyTech

Sun's new UltraSPARC T2, formerly codenamed Niagara 2, may find its way outside of the server market... Front Page

[Gizmo]

I rather doubt it includes a pair of 10 giga-byte ethernet ports. 10 giga-bit, maybe.

[Áedán]

It's a nice feature list.

• Dual 10GbE on chip
• Eight lanes of PCI Express I/O on chip
• Four integrated memory controllers on chip, supporting a maximum of 64 FB-DIMMs.
• 8 cores with a crypto unit per core. Each core supports 8 threads (Hyper threading supported 2 threads).

Looks like Sun decided to include the memory controller and PCI Express onboard the same chip.

[Daniel ~]

Has this chip any desktop potential?

[Áedán]

Only if you want to run Solaris or Linux.

[Daniel ~]

And if one runs Linux? Sorry just curious. I like to have choices even if I don't understand them.":O}

[Áedán]

You could use it on your desktop.

[Daniel ~]

Do you think they will attempt to market it as a desktop, You'd better tell me, your running out of teeth to pull! ":O}

[Gizmo]

The press release seems to suggest that they might make a lesser version of the chip for desktop use. Don't forget that desktops are having a hard time making the price/value proposition for dual-core CPUs, and this thing has 8 cores.

[cloasters]

Last time I checked, which was years ago, UltraSparcs were ~$4000. Are we really raking in that much cash?!?

[Gizmo]

The full-blown chip will sell for about $1000; lesser versions will be cheaper, obviously.

[dsio]

Given that a certain poorly run datacenter is willing to charge $1099/month for a dual clovertown machine, the cost of one of these starts sounding less extreme.