Niagara 2 Chips Announced, but No Servers Yet

Sun has formally announced the multi-threaded UltraSPARC T2 processor chip, previously known as Niagara 2. Like the predecessor T1 chip (Niagara), the T2 chip has eight cores per chip and is aimed at workloads with natural parallelism, as opposed to serving job streams requiring fastest single thread performance. T2 enhancements include, among other features, eight threads per core compared to the T1’s four per core, a floating point unit per core compared to one per chip on the T1, plus the addition of built-in dual port 10 Gigabit Ethernet and a cryptographic unit per core. As announced, T2 clocks at the same 1.4 GHz as T1, but has 4 MB of L2 cache compared to 3 MB of its predecessor. Performance on a per thread basis will be enhanced by the presence of the floating point units as well as the Ethernet and Crypto offload engines. Nonetheless, a major difference is that T2 supports 64 threads compared to the T1’s 32 threads. Highly parallel workloads, such as web-facing or Java servers can likely take advantage of the increased number of threads.

Although systems using T2 were not officially announced along with the chip, their unveiling is anticipated soon. IDEAS expects 1U and 2U servers, similar to today’s T1-based T1000 and T2000 servers. Note that T2 does not support SMP (neither did T1), so rumored servers with two (or more?) sockets would operate as independent operating environments that share a rack-mount enclosure. Next year’s Victoria Falls (aka Niagara 2+) will support two chip SMPs. Thus, introduction of multi-socket servers for T2 could provide not just rack density but might serve as a presumably-upgradeable place-holder for Victoria Falls.

Sun indicates sales of T1-based systems are up 225% year-over-year, with $200 million T1 systems sales booked in just the last quarter. The T1 chip has addressed a customer need for low power consumption, high density computing. Many, if not most, T1 systems appeared to have been deployed in the front-end web-facing tier. With the T2 refinements, Sun will likely target more general purpose computing, looking to extend into mid-tier midrange application servers as well as continuing to satisfy the highly parallel front-end workloads.

Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux distributions are available for today’s T1000/T2000 and are expected to be available for T2-powered servers. Note though, that Linux support is “from the community;” Sun only formally supports Solaris 10. Solaris 10 Containers and LDOMs are available on T2. That is, the 64 threads of T2 can support 64 independent LDOMs, each with its own software stack.

Bottom line: T2 exists and servers using this chip are anticipated to be announced soon. For environments seeking low power consumption, high compute density solutions, the eight-cores and 64-threads of T2 should be a serious competitor against Xeon and Opteron servers (that are only now becoming available with four cores per processor module). There are many applications that can take advantage of the high multi-threading of T2, but sufficiently parallelized software may limit Sun’s push to extend beyond the front-end computing tier.