Brookwood praised Sun for realizing the importance of thread-level parallelism in the transaction-intensive Internet era of computing. By contrast, competitors Intel and Hewlett-Packard developed their Itanium server microprocessor focusing on instruction-level parallelism at a time before the Web boom hit.
That's not necessarily a drawback, said Jerry Huck, a fellow in HP's server group who helped design the original single-threaded Itanium. Itanium has better single-thread performance and use of cache memory, he said. "We are finding to give up much on core performance is not cost-effective," he said. "It's better to take as much core performance as you can and then replicate processors."
With Niagara, "I can now have 30 threads that are basically thrashing the cache and come out way behind," he said.
Sun's new servers leverage as many mainstream server components as possible. The 1U T1000 and 2U T2000 use the same chassis, fans and power supplies as Sun's Opteron-based X86 servers. The 70-W Niagara processor, made in a 90-nm process by Texas Instruments, requires just three fans rather than six in the Opteron systems.
A Niagara processor board with up to eight DDR-2 DIMM slots links to Sun's existing J-Bus bridge chip on a separate I/O board that is otherwise populated with off-the-shelf PCI Express parts. The I/O board has two 8x Express slots and four Gbit Ethernet ports.
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