Sun Tapes Out Sparc T2 Chip, Ships T1000 Servers

Published: April 13, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems continues to bang the drum for its innovative "Niagara" Sparc T1 multithreaded processors as it somewhat patiently lets customers explore the technology and see the benefits of what it has created. The initial servers using the T1 chips, the T2000s, shipped in early December, and this week Sun said that the entry boxes using the T1s, the T1000s, had begun shipping. The company also said that it had just taped out the design on the T2 successor to the Niagara chip as well.

Sun has been banking on the thermal and density advantages of the T1 processors to help it get its way back into the hearts and minds of data centers, which used to pay big bucks for little Sparc servers a decade ago. On Web infrastructure and entry database workloads, the T1 processor has roughly the same performance as a two-socket Xeon server using single core processors, but the resulting system generates a lot less heat because the T1 chip has a thermal design power (TDP) of about 79 watts under peak loading and 72 watts under normal loading.

The T1 chips run at 1 GHz or 1.2 GHz and comes with four, six, or eight cores activated; each core has four processor threads, and the architecture of the chip is such that Sun claims to be able to keep the threads active about 75 percent of the time. The T1 chip has 16 KB of instruction cache per core and 8 KB of data cache per core, plus a 3 MB L2 cache shared by all of the cores; the chip also has four DDR2 interfaces on chip that run at 533 MHz, including chipkill, and the integrated memory controller on the chip can support four DIMMs for each of the four controllers. The T1 also includes the JBus interface that made its debut with Sun's "Jalapeno" UltraSparc-IIIi processors. The JBus is a bit like AMD's HyperTransport interconnect in that it is used to link processor cores together and to connect to outside I/O devices. The interface for a PCI Express is also on the chip. The T1 chips are absolutely binary compatible with prior Sparc servers. What the T1 chip did not have is the electronics that allows multiple chips to be ganged up together in a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) or non-uniform memory access (NUMA) cluster, presenting an abstract hardware instance for a single operating system to run on.

The T1 chip is manufactured for Sun by Texas Instruments, as other Sparc processors are, and in this case it uses a 90 nanometer manufacturing process.

Last December, when the T1 chip was announced, Sun was able to deliver limited quantities of the larger "Ontario" T2000 server, but was not able to deliver the smaller (and less peppy) T1000 server, which was code-named "Erie." The T1000 comes in a 1U form factor that can have a T1 chip with six or eight cores (that's 24 or 32 threads) running at 1 GHz, and has one PCI Express slot and room for a single disk drive. Prices for T1000 configurations range from $2,995 to $10,995 for small, medium, and large setups, as is Sun's standard practice. That initial configuration comes with the Erie chassis, a 6-core, 24-thread 1 GHz T1 chip, 2 GB of main memory (expandable to 16 GB), and a Solaris 10 operating system.

The larger T2000 server uses the Ontario chassis, which is in a larger 2U form factor that allows for more peripherals, for redundant power and cooling, and for more threads in the Niagara to be activated and to run at the higher 1.2 GHz clock speed. The T2000 supports T1 chips with support for four, six, and eight cores with 16, 24, or 32 threads activated, and it has three PCI Express slots, two PCI-X slots, and room for two small form factor SAS drives. These machines come with 8 GB of memory and two 73 GB SAS drives; the two low-end boxes (with four and six cores activated) in the T2000 run the T1 chip at 1 GHz, while the eight-core machine offers the 1 GHz and 1.2 GHz processors. The top-end T2000 box, with 32 GB of main memory and eight 1.2 GHz cores plus two SAS drives costs $26,995, while the entry T2000 machine with four 1 GHz cores, 8 GB of memory, and two SAS disks costs $7,795.

What everyone wants to know is how the T2000s have been selling, and how Sun expects the T1000s and T2000s to sell going forward. Paul Durzan, group marketing manager for the Niagara product line at Sun's Scalable Systems Group, was able to shed a little light on this.

"We are selling thousands of them, and we have a very strong pipeline," Durzan explains. "The Niagara ramp up is actually going pretty well." He says that the "try and buy" program that Sun announced at the end of last year really got moving in February--presumably when Sun had sufficient machines to let customers try--and that it has signed up over 1,000 companies in the program. Perhaps most importantly, says Durzan, 60 percent of the customers in the program have never been Sun customers before.

One of the customers that Sun is bragging about is Sina.com, the largest Web portal in China, which is replacing its Dell PowerEdge servers running Linux with T1000 servers running Solaris 10. Durzan was not able to confirm how many machines were in the order, but this is clearly the kind of order that Sun wants to take a lot of from here on out. "Our goal is to have good volumes and cross over into that X86 space with Niagara."

Of course, it will all come down to volumes, and this is something that Sun has been pretty unwilling to talk about. Last year, the world consumed some 7 million servers, which is just an astonishing number, and the vast majority of these were using X86 or X64 processors. So the target market is potentially very large for the T1000 and T2000 servers. But not all workloads run on the T1 chips--Linux is not yet an option, and neither is BSD Unix, so you pretty much are limited to the Solaris stack right now. Windows will probably never be ported to the T1 chips or the OpenSparc variants, but because Sun has taken the chip open source, anything is actually possible. Moving workloads does not necessarily mean companies want to take their operating system with them, and a lot of shops that have dumped Solaris for Linux might be fairly easy to convince to dump Linux for Solaris--if the price, thermals, and support are right.

That's why Durzan says that it is not unreasonable for the T1000 and T2000 servers to see the kind of volumes that the entry Sun Fire 240 and 440 servers see. Sun typically sells about 20,000 of the Sun Fire 240 machines per quarter, and about 10,000 to 12,000 of the larger Sun Fire 440 servers per quarter. These volumes would be a good starting point for the Niagara ramp.

Of course, Sun has to keep pace with performance and thermal improvements in the X64 chips from rival Intel and partner AMD if it wants Niagara to thrive. That is what the T2 processor, or "Niagara-II," is all about. Sun is not saying much about the T2 chip, except that it taped out at the end of March, that it will have 64 threads, that it will have about twice the performance of the current T1 chip, and that it will be available in systems the second half of 2007--probably toward the end of the year.

It is my guess that the T2 chip will be implemented in a 65 nanometer process, which should allow Sun to goose clock speeds to 2 GHz or higher. But Durzan said that the T2 chip will have double the threads, which seems to imply that Sun will keep the clock speed low and add cores, doubling from eight to 16 cores in the chip. This way, Sun can stay within the same TDP and deliver twice the kick. I also happen to think that Sun will be adding electronics for SMP or NUMA clustering into the T2 chip, something that was missing from the T1. This will allow Sun to cram two or four T2 chips into a single chassis, and if the JBus technology is like HyperTransport in the way that I think it is, do so reasonably gluelessly. Such a box with four T2 chips would pack 256 threads and would be a very powerful machine, even if it did only run at 1.2 GHz.

Durzan says that the T1 tape out only had 12 bugs in it, which is why Sun could bring it to market so fast, and he says that the T2 chip was similarly a very clean design. Which should mean Sun should kick in it and get the chip out the door way before the end of 2007. Time is money.

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