Sun Makes Niagara Teaser Announcement, Servers Imminent

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When a server vendor has a leak the size of, er, Niagara Falls that lets out all of the major feeds and speeds, marketing pitches, and prices of a new generation of servers, and then has its top brass talk about moving up that processor announcement, and then sends out invitations to an announcement of great import for November 14 to all the members of the IT press, it is reasonable to expect an imminent server announcement. And that is what we all did. But Sun Microsystems did not, alas, announce its new "Niagara" servers this week, but rather had a coming out party for the Niagara processor itself.

Sun has spent the past few years talking about its so-called "throughput computing" initiative to create Sparc processors and systems that have many processor threads and use them efficiently to create low-power, high-bandwidth servers. In recent weeks, as a prelude to the Niagara Sparc T1 processor and as part of the roll out of the similarly energy-conscious "Galaxy" line of Opteron-based servers, Sun has been turning up the volume on low-power computing, hoping to get us all in an "ecological" frame of mind so we can appreciate all of the neato, eco processor and server technology that Sun is going to try to charge a premium for. In fact, this is all part of a "rolling thunder" marketing campaign, according to David Yen, executive vice president of Sun's Scalable Systems Group, which is the result of the merger of its Sparc microprocessor design unit and its Sparc server unit.

Sun is trying to get people to talk about the power, heat, and ecological issues ahead of when the Niagara products actually launch, and by the way, Yen won't say when that is. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that Sun has its Network Computing 4Q05 quarterly product announcement on December 6, and that Sun chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy, said that the Niagara's would ship before the end of the calendar year. So, expect the announcements on December 6. That's when the rain actually starts, as opposed to the marketing thunder.

Chip Tease

Yen did not confirm a lot of the details of the Niagara T1 processor announcements or their related "Erie" and "Ontario" servers, but he did confirm some of the information I divulged last week. Sun is calling its chip multithreading--the Niagara chip has eight minimalist Sparc processor cores, each capable of handling four threads--CoolThreads, and you have to wonder why the marketing people didn't call it CoolMultiThreads, which also fit the Chip MultiThreading, or CMT, acronym Sun has been using to characterize its approach to future Sparc chip designs. The initial Niagara chip is called the T1, and it will run at a top speed of 1.2 GHz, is implemented in a 90 nanometer process, and dissipates about 72 watts running normal workloads and 79 watts under peak loading. This essentially what Sun said in its T1 announcement, other than CoolThreads is a trademark, so if you are thinking of using it to describe your own personal fashion, well, that is now illegal.

There were some other details. The T1 chip will come with four, six, or eight cores activated and will run at 1 GHz and 1.2 GHz. The 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 T1 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 chip also includes the JBus interface that made its debit 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 feeds and speeds of the T1 chips will be interesting to techies, of course. But Sun is trying to take a higher road to try to peddle its Niagara gear. "It's time the technology industry took a stand--tripling your datacenter performance shouldn't mean tripling your power bill and needing more coal fired power plants," Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer, said at the T1 announcement. "It's becoming more obvious by the day that extreme efficiency is good for the environment, and good for business--there are proof points everywhere, from hybrid auto companies that can't keep up with demand to fuel efficient aircraft dominating the marketplace. Customers want this same Eco-responsibility in their datacenters."

The basic idea is one that probably doesn't resonate all that well with the public, but is starting to make some sense to data center mangers, the system operators who run around data centers, and the facility managers who actually get stuck with the electricity and heating bills for computing. The following statements all have a ring of silliness to them because they try to make the consumption of power and the need for cooling for computers real to people, just like data storage vendors are always translating the capacity of main or disk memory to a certain ridiculous number of typed pages--stacked from here to the Moon and back, or some such nonsense. But if you live with a cluster of servers (as I do), and you have to pay for the electricity and cooling, I can tell you from personal experience that it is loud, expensive, and annoying, and the heating and thermal issues that Sun has taken on--to its great credit--are very real and worth fixing. The question is will this "eco-responsible" marketing message actually move IT managers to buy Sun's servers? Will saying that replacing every Web server in the world with a Niagara server saving $14 billion in energy costs be real enough? I am sure Sun's math is reasonable when it claims that if half of the entry servers sold in the past three years were replaced with Niagara machines, it would cut down carbon dioxide emissions by over 11 million tons a year--the equivalent of the exhaust of 1 million sport utility vehicles. Sun explained further in its announcement of the T1 name that if every Web server in the world were replaced with a Niagara system with half the number of sockets (not cores, but sockets), this would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million acres of walnut trees.

I have been promoting such thinking about power and cooling for years, and I had a long discussion with Yen about the energy situation, our shared belief that we are at peak worldwide oil production, and what this might mean for energy costs and, ultimately, our ability to provide affordable power not just for computing, but for everything. When you add in the exploding demand for power in the emerging economies of the world, the scenario is a recipe for the kind of ecological, eco-responsible call to action that Sun has made.

It is also true that Sun needs the sales pitch for Galaxy and Niagara servers today and for the future "Rock" massively multithreaded chips due in 2008 to give it an edge in mindshare so it can turn that into market share. But it won't necessarily be easy. "The Sparc renaissance is happening just when Sun is financially stretched," Yen concedes. But Yen and his chip design team has turned the UltraSparc chip quite a bit by getting the "Panther" UltraSparc-IV+ chips in the field and closing the price/performance gap it had with IBM and Hewlett-Packard. And the advent of Niagara certainly bodes well. But truth be told, Sun needed products like Niagara in the field in 2002, not 2005. It will be a harder sell for the Sparc-Solaris T1 chip precisely because there are low-powered Galaxy machines that can run Solaris as well as Windows and Linux.

Customers are going to have to be very careful to get the right kinds of workloads for T1 processors and their related servers, and the sales pitch between UltraSparc-IV+, Sparc64 through its partnership with Fujitsu-Siemens, Opterons, and T1s is going to be more complicated than a pure UltraSparc-II sale from days gone by in the dot-com era. But, IBM manages selling four different server architectures, so Sun can do it. And if you think of Niagara as more of a prototype for Rock processors as well as an interesting way to help fund the development of massively multithreaded processors by making a machine that solves a very precise set of problems that Sun might have a chance to sell at a premium, then you probably have thought about the Niagara chips in the right way.

Having said that, Niagara2 is targeted for launch, according to Yen, maybe some time in late 2006 or early 2007 using 65 nanometer technologies, and Niagara3 is in development now. "Commodity processors have reduced costs because the volume is very high, but this approach tends to stifle innovation," he says. It is hard to argue that point. Intel has not exactly been on the front edge of innovation in chip design, and is only beginning to understand the issues that are causing customers to adopt Opteron and maybe T1 processors. Sun is clearly counting on selling these chips and continuing to innovate in this low-power, multithreaded computing arena. But to make it work financially, Sun may have to bit the bullet and support Linux and FreeBSD on these processors, since these are prevalent among the ISP farms and corporate Web farms of the world.

The issue now is what workloads can the T1 chips actually run when the Erie and Ontario servers are announced? I guess we will find out in a few weeks.

If you want to see the feeds and speeds of the Niagara-based servers, see the story below that we ran last week.

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