Sun Finally Announces Niagara-Based Sparc Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

This week, after several years of talking and waiting and planning, Sun Microsystems is finally taking the wraps off its "Niagara" seriously multithreaded and eight-cored Sparc processors. A few weeks ago, Sun announced the processors without much detail and dubbed them the Sparc T1s and their threading approach CoolThreads. The idea was to build up awareness for the Sparc T1s in a "rolling thunder" public relations campaign, but Sun has been hammering on the ideas behind the Niagara chips for years.

And word has been leaking out about the "Erie" and "Ontario" servers that use the Sparc T1 processors for many weeks now, and we have already given you many of the details of the machines. A recap is in order about exactly what the T1 chips are and how the servers that use them are configured. The new data that Sun discussed at its Network Computing Q4 2005 announcements in New York this week is how these machines will performance compared to alternatives--particularly those not based on Opteron processors from AMD, but rather on Intel's Xeon processors.

As expected, the T1 processor will come in a number of different flavors, with different numbers of cores and threads activated and running at two different clock speeds. The T1 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. 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 interface for a PCI Express is also on the chip, too. The T1 chips are absolutely binary compatible with prior Sparc servers.

(As a surprise kicker to the T1 announcement, Sun said that it would take the new chip open source. Yup. You heard that right. To read all about that development, read the separate story on our Web site, Sun to Take New T1 Sparc Chip Open Source.)

Sun's draft press releases for the T1 announcements called the T1 a "9.6 GHz" processor, and when I talked to Fred Kohout, vice president of marketing for the Scalable Systems Group, prior to the announcement, I tried to dissuade him and therefore Sun from trying to talk about the chip this way. Sun has been trying to call the dual-core UltraSparc-IV and UltraSparc-IV+ processors "multi-threaded" rather than dual-core, which is a misleading when much software is based on core count, not socket count, and calling the T1 chip a 9.6 GHz processor rather than an eight-core, 32-thread 1.2 GHz processor, is just silly. You can say that it performs like a 9.6 GHz processor does--and, in fact, if you want to be honest about it, it performs like a 7.2 GHz processor because under normal circumstances Sun can only keep the 32 threads busy 75 percent of the time. Hopefully, Sun will just stop trying to be clever about how it talks about multi-core, multi-thread chips and just focus on the real and substantial benefits these T1 chips have. There is such a thing as being too clever for your own good.

The Erie and Ontario servers that use the T1 chips are based on the same chasses used in the "Galaxy" line of Opteron servers that were just announced in mid-September. The Sun Fire T1000 uses the Erie chassis, which is 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. This machine has one PCI Express slot and supports 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 for $2,995. A T1000 server with an 8-core, 32-thread T1 processor running at 1 GHz, 8 GB of main memory, and Solaris 10 costs $7,995. 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 4, 6, and 8 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 4 and 6 cores activated) in the T2000 run the T1 chip at 1 GHz, while the 8-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. Platinum-level support over three years, including break-fix, software updates and upgrades, and technical support, costs $7,013 for the T1000 and $12,501 for the T2000.

"We think this is a game-changing announcement," boasts Kohout, who was understandably defensive when I said how different Sun's market position would be today in the server market if the Niagara boxes were here three years ago. And, he correctly pointed out, Sun is delivering the Niagara processors today, and heating and efficiency issues are getting worse, so it is not like Sun is late to the party on this one. "Systems of this nature do not happen overnight," Kohout explains, "but this is the result of us sitting down four years ago to create the first purpose-built processors for the Internet buildout. We think we are five years ahead of the competition." That may be stretching it a bit, but it is going to be several years before anyone else gets an eight-core processor to market that burns under 80 watts. Of course, the system power usage is the main thing customers worry about. According to Kohout, a fully loaded T1000 server with very heavy Web infrastructure workloads peaks out at about 180 watts of power usage and heat dissipation, while a heavily configured T2000 consumes and dissipates about 300 watts running peak loads.

Because Solaris 10 knows how to make use of many threads already and because Web infrastructure and databases do as well, the Niagara processors are showing relatively high performance considering their relatively low clock speeds. In general, Kohout says that the T1 servers will offer about three to four times the performance, take up about half the space, and consume as little as 25 to 50 percent of the power of equivalent Xeon-based and Itanium-based servers. Sun is expected to divulge performance results using the SPECweb2005 benchmark tests, and we will tell you all about them when the details are available.

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