Sun Moves Up Niagara Sparc Server Announcement

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The word on the street is that Sun Microsystems is getting enough good yields on its "Niagara" multithreaded Sparc processor that it can move the announcement, which was expected in early 2006, to next week. Sun's top brass hinted that the Niagara would be coming out early in their conference call last week with Wall Street analysts discussing Sun's first fiscal quarter 2006 financial results. They didn't say when the Niagara chip and its servers would be launched, but the announcement is widely expected to be on November 14.

Sun has been talking about the Niagara processors for so long that it is hard to remember that they actually haven't started shipping yet. While Sun will undoubtedly go on about how it got Niagara to market earlier than expected--which I admit is a rarity in the computer business, and worth some kudos--the fact of the matter is that the market needed something like Niagara about two to three years ago. Sun was prescient with the RISC workstation market it founded, and was equally prescient with its creation of large, scalable Unix servers. Sun is a very tough act for itself to follow. So that criticism should be taken with a pinch of lime and some salt.

According to sources familiar with Sun's plans, the Niagara chip will be sold as the UltraSparc T1 processor, the T standing for Thread, presumably. The Niagara chip is massively multi-cored, with each core being based on a cut-down, minimalist version of the UltraSparc-II core, but one with four processor threads. The Niagara chip puts eight cores (for a total of 32 threads) plus a memory subsystem and the interface for a PCI Express bus all on a single piece of silicon. Back in July, Sun executives were saying that performance was coming in at the high end of expectations for the chip, which means above the 15 times performance rating compared to the "Jalapeno" UltraSparc-IIIi running at 1 GHz. It has been hard to say what the clock speed would be on the Niagara chip, but years ago I did the math and figured out it would have to be around 1.2 GHz to deliver that performance. I am happy to report I did my math correctly.

Sun is also telling customers to expect a Niagara kicker that offers twice as much performance as the initial chips, which will presumably be done by ramping up clock speed and maybe adding cores. Sources say that Sun will deliver Niagara processors with four, six, or eight cores activated, spanning 16, 24, and 32 threads.

As expected, the Niagara servers, which are apparently code-named "Erie" and "Ontario," are based on the same chasses used in the "Galaxy" line of Opteron servers that were just announced in mid-September. The Erie chassis will be sold as the Sun Fire T1000 and it appears to be a 1U chassis that supports a Niagara chip with six or eight cores (that's 24 or 32 threads) running at 1 GHz. This machine has one PCI Express slot and supports a single disk drive. Prices for T1000 configurations are expected to be from $2,995 to $10,995 for small, medium, and large setups, as is Sun's standard practice.

The larger "Ontario" server, which will be sold as the T2000, is a 2U form factor that looks like the Galaxy X4200 from the outside. It uses 1.2 GHz Niagara chips with support for 16, 24, or 32 threads. It has three PCI Express slots, two PCI-X slots, and room for small form factor SAS drives. The Erie server is aimed at customers who need the most density and who are willing to sacrifice around 20 percent performance to get it (think Web infrastructure), while the Ontario box is aimed at bigger workloads that need more expandability (think application servers and entry databases). Both will obviously run Solaris 10, and are binary compatible with prior Sparc servers. The T2000 servers will be a bit more pricey, with prices ranging from $7,795 to $25,995.

It will be very interesting to see where the Niagara chips come in with performance, and how the Erie and Ontario servers compare to similar Opteron-based Galaxy machines running Solaris 10. Unlike the Galaxies, which can support Solaris 10, Linux, and Windows Server 2003, the Niagaras can only run Solaris 10.