August 16th, 2007
Analysis of Sun's 'Niagara 2' UltraSPARC T2
Sun Microsystems launched their brand new “Niagara 2″ UltraSPARC T2 8-core CPU last Tuesday August 7th 2007 as the successor to the UltraSPARC T1 8-core CPU launched in November of 2005. During the launch Sun’s executive VP David Yen took a few shots at big iron competitors IBM and Intel by noting that they didn’t try to crank the clock speed to 4.7 GHz (referring to IBM Power6) or try to shove 24 MBs of Cache (referring to Intel Itanium 2) though this was a bit strange since the UltraSPARC T2 isn’t really aimed at the big iron market at all. Of course Sun’s launch page does take a shot at Intel’s x86/x64 quad-core CPUs by saying that they didn’t resort to “packaging gimmicks, such as MultiChip Modules (MCMs)”. At the end of the launch event during questions and answers, one of the event highlights was when CEO Jonathan Schwartz came to the defense of Linux in response to someone saying that Linux has a “checkered past” with scalability by saying that Solaris has a “checkered past” with usability.
Market for UltraSPARC T2
The UltraSPARC T2 processor is designed to go in to a single CPU server from Sun Microsystems and it should not be compared to Itanium2 or Power6 that are designed to scale to 32 or 64 CPU “big iron” servers. Sun’s Niagara series chips are designed to consolidate up to 64 slower legacy SPARC-based servers or host up to 64 lightly-loaded logical servers using Solaris 10 containers or LDoms (Logical Domains). But because container and LDOM technology only supports Solaris 10, legacy servers that are likely running older versions of Solaris will need to be validated to run on Solaris 10. While that validation process of migrating legacy servers should usually go smoothly, the cost and time required is non-zero and it isn’t as simple as Virtualization technology such as VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server which allows you to basically import legacy machines as is without changing the OS version or OS vendor. But once the migration is complete, there can be massive annual savings just in the hardware maintenance cost of the old legacy SPARC servers, rack space, and power consumption.
UltraSPARC T2 Architecture
The UltraSPARC T2 is an 8-core CPU built on a 65nm process and is based on a single 342mm squared die. That’s relatively small considering the fact that eight Intel Core 2 65nm cores (two processors) would measure 572mm squared and eight 65nm Barcelona cores (two processors) would measure 566mm squared. While that might sound like it makes the UltraSPARC T2 cheap to make, reality hits when you realize that 342mm squared is a huge single die. Intel’s 65nm dual-core dies are only 143mm squared and AMD’s upcoming 65nm Barcelona die is 283mm squared which is already big. Any tiny flaw in that massive 342mm squared die means the whole chip is bad or you have to give up two or four of the cores though it’s not known if Sun will offer 4- or 6-core versions of the T2 like they did for the T1.
The UltraSPARC T2 has 8 1.4 GHz cores with 2 pipelines per core and 4 threads per pipeline giving it a total of 64 threads that it can support. The T2 CPU has eight crypto processors designed to offload symmetric and asymmetric encryption as well as hashing functions. The UltraSPARC T2 also has eight fully pipelined floating point units making it substantially better than its T1 predecessor. The T2 die also houses four memory controllers that can support up to 512 GBs of fully buffered DIMMs with an aggregate memory bandwidth of 64 gbps. Even a 10 gigabit Ethernet controller and a PCI-Express controller are included in the UltraSPARC T2 processor.
Note: Surprisingly, Sun actually shortchanged their own T2 processor at the launch event by saying that it would shave $190 from the cost of the motherboard because you don’t need a 10 gigabit Ethernet controller and crypto offload engine. $190 might be the cost to the motherboard manufacture to integrate those components but the end user will see a multiple of that cost when they buy the actual server. However, even 8-core UltraSPARC T1 servers have been known to be twice as expensive ($30K from Sun and $15K from HP) as an 8-core x86/x64 servers from Intel so the true savings may be dubious. Given the steep pricing on the UltraSPARC T1, I don’t expect the T2 to be cheaper.
<Next page - UltraSPARC T2 performance and power consumption>
Pages: 1 2
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
