Sun Microsystems Enters Commercial Silicon Market

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Sun Microsystems announced the world's fastest commodity microprocessor, the UltraSPARC(R) T2.

Sun Microsystems announced the world's fastest commodity microprocessor, the UltraSPARC(R) T2, as the cornerstone of its merchant portfolio of microelectronics. Available for sale separate from Sun's own systems, this new processor is the industry's first volume processor with eight cores and eight threads per core.

Formerly known as the 'Niagara 2' project, the UltraSPARC T2's world-record performance raises the bar on commodity processors while boasting the industry's highest energy efficiency per thread. With each thread capable of running its own operating system, the chip delivers a whopping 64-way system on a single chip. Sun will provide the UltraSPARC T2 processor design to the free and open source community via the GPL license.

"The market for commodity silicon and the devices they power is well into the tens of billions of dollars," said Arnab Roy, GM Marketing, Sun Microsystems India. "The UltraSPARC T2 processor also makes possible a new breed of co

mpact, power-efficient, highly integrated devices going beyond servers to routers, switches, network devices, medical imaging, industrial printing and more. With UltraSPARC T2 technology, we can bring the speed and scalability of chip multithreading into much wider use and provide welcome alternatives to companies that want commodity economics without commodity performance."

"We're at a historic point in computing, moving away from sequential processing to multicore designs," said Pardee Chair of Computer Science for the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Dave Patterson. "Hence, we need to invent new ways to evaluate these new parallel systems. Our initial experiments suggest that Niagara 2 has the highest performance, is the most power efficient and is the most 'software friendly' of the processors we've tested."

The UltraSPARC T2 is the industry's first processor to bring together the key functions of multiple systems' virtualization, processing, network