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Never one to cower in the face of hyperbole, Sun Microsystems has come out touting the new eight-core UltraSPARC T2 - aka Niagara II - chip as the world's fastest microprocessor.
We've written so much about Niagara II that there's not much left with which to surprise you. As promised, the chip has just as many cores as Niagara I but doubles the thread count to 64. The chip also has one floating point unit per core, as opposed to Niagara I's lone floating point unit. And, lastly, the chip should debut, according to Sun, at 1.4GHz in systems shipping in the fourth quarter, although we've noted Sun already has Solaris support for a 1.5GHz version of the chip.
TheRegister wrote:
Beyond these basics, Niagara II does bring some fancier features. For one, Sun has included an on-chip 10GbE NIC. In addition, you'll find eight crypto acceleration units and eight lanes of PCI Express I/O, along with four memory controllers.
All of this horsepower should help Niagara II-based systems extend well beyond the web serving market that has been Niagara I's home.
Of course, the extra performance does come with costs. Niagara II will consume a max of 120 watts and an average of 95 watts whereas Niagara I ate through 70 watts on average. Sun likes to offset focus on this power increase by noting that Niagara II will need about 2 watts per thread, which is hard to argue against.
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