Tech Shout!

Computer maker and server vendor Sun Microsystems is scheduled to roll out what it claims to be the world’s fastest commodity microprocessor. The company hopes to launch into a new business of selling chips to makers of set-top boxes, routers and other hardware.

Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said, “Sun is entering the merchant silicon business and by that we’re going to be chasing the commodity volume markets which are not simply limited to the market place for server computers.”

The new Sun Microsystems chip will officially be christened ‘UltraSparc T2’. Servers based on this very chip are expected to ship sometime later this year.

The UltraSparc T2 chip, which has also been codenamed Niagara 2, follows the company’s Niagara 1 chip. However, this Niagara 2 is said to be more powerful and is even capable of executing 64 threads (sequences of instructions), at a time, in comparison to competing chips that can handle just one to four threads simultaneously.

Thus, the 8-core Niagara 2 chip doubles the number of threads over Sun Microsystem’s previous model to eight, allowing the chip to perform 64 tasks at one time.

Additionally, since the UltraSparc T2 chip moves from a 90nm to a 65nm production process, Sun Microsystems has been able to achieve a 10% reduction in its overall size.

What’s more; the Niagara 2 chip also offers two virtualized 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, an embedded memory controller and also features eight cryptographic accelerators. Each core gains a floating point unit that accelerates number crunching applications such as those found in scientific simulations.

The addition of features that are normally found in a server’s chip set caused Sun to refer to Niagara 2 as a “server on a chip”.

Niagara 2 is currently available to system builders. Sun Microsystems expects to start shipping its first Niagara 2-based systems later this year.