Commodity microprocessor
From WikiCover
On August 7, 2007, Sun Microsystems announced a fast commodity microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T2, as the cornerstone of its merchant portfolio of microelectronics. The new processor is the industry's first volume processor with eight cores and eight threads per core. Formerly known as the Niagara 2 project, the UltraSPARC T2's world-record performance raises the bar on commodity processors while boasting the industry's highest energy efficiency per thread. With each thread capable of running its own operating system, the chip delivers a 64-way system on a single chip. Sun will provide the UltraSPARC T2 processor design to the free and open source community via the GPL license.
The UltraSPARC T2 brings together the key functions of multiple systems-virtualization, processing, networking, security, floating point units and accelerated memory access. Integrating these elements on a single piece of silicon reduces cost and increases performance, reliability and energy efficiency-making it the superior choice for a diversity of workloads, from networking equipment to high-performance computing or storage devices. As a general-purpose processor, the UltraSPARC T2 also provides support for the massively threaded, open source Solaris operating system, and other real-time operating systems, as well as future versions of Ubuntu Linux, bringing a massive community of developers and productivity to the growing market.
This next generation of the UltraSPARC family of processors also extends its lead in eco performance, bringing Sun's revolutionary CoolThreads chip multithreading (CMT) technology to the UltraSPARC T2 processor, powered by fewer than two watts per thread. At one-tenth to one-thirtieth the power consumption of competitive offerings, the UltraSPARC T2 processor sets the gold standard for green computing and efficiency, combining the industry's lowest power consumption with double the cores, 16 times the threads, 4 times the throughput, with on-chip network and security functionality.