Sun To Release 8-Core Niagara 2 Processor 214
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems is set to announce its eight-core Niagara 2 processor next week. Each core supports eight threads, so the chip handles 64 simultaneous threads, making it the centerpiece of Sun's "Throughput Computing" effort. Along with having more cores than the quads from Intel and AMD, the Niagara 2 have dual, on-chip 10G Ethernet ports with cryptographic capability. Sun doesn't get much processor press, because the chips are used only in its own CoolThreads servers, but Niagara 2 will probably be the fastest processor out there when it's released, other than perhaps the also little-known 4-GHz IBM Power 6."
Trust me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:yes but ... (Score:4, Funny)
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can it blend? - yes I'm sure it can, the iphone blended.
speaking of which how much does this processor cost, and why doesn't Sun Microsystems make laptops, I was looking for Unix machines recently and I decided to go with the Mac book pro, rather than the Linux machines (laptops) at Dell, because of the hardware and general lack of processing power, which doesn't seem to lend itself to virtualizing other Operating systems.
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They do. Ultra 3 Mobile [sun.com].
There are also the units from Tadpole [tadpole.com], and I'm sure others
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There's been a lot of (justified) doubt in the past about Sun's commitment to Solaris x86, bit it clearly is the future of consumer-directed Solaris. And it rocks.
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That's not fair! (Score:2, Funny)
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I for one welcome our new Soylent Green producing, waterfall powered overlords..
Re:Trust me... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.opensparc.net/ [opensparc.net]
They are openly discussing making the Niagara 2 available as open source as well, but note that there are some roadblocks such as the US government's restrictions [opensparc.net] on crypto technology.
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Good enough for raster graphics, not so good for vector graphics or 3D due to there being only 8 FPUs on the die, with only twice the floating point throughput of the terrible-at-floating-point T1. Unless you do swap some of the throughput for soft-floating-point.
Re:Trust me... (Score:5, Informative)
- The T2 is mainly focussed on integer ops with only one floating point pipeline per core. A GPU typically is close to 100% floating point pipelines, and doesn't bother with integer arithmetic.
- The T2 uses multiple contexts to hide memory latency, mostly caused by incorrectly predicted branches. A GPU typically doesn't bother much with branch prediction, since it runs code that is very light on conditional branches (on average, branches happen every 7 ops in general purpose code. In GPU code, they happen every few hundred).
- GPUs usually focus on 4-way vector instructions, since most of their data is of this form (RGBA colours, XYZW vertexes). The T2 only has scalar instructions.
I posted in my journal recently suggesting that it would be easier to produce a modern GPU than an older card, since modern GPUs have much less application-specific logic and do more in software, relying on just having lots of cores / pipelines to give speed.Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Which makes me wonder ... if most of the work of a video card these days is done in software, and one of the biggest complaints about Linux is the lack of good free/open source drivers for high-end NVIDIA/ATI graphics cards, then why, exactly aren't FOS
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Because the sunk cost to get involved in graphics cards is huge
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Of course, I know that generic x86 boxes (running Linux or, gulp, NT) killed the workstation market and that it would be hard to justify any development in this direction.
It seems the Niagara 2 is more fit for desktop workloads than the first one. Maybe they can do it again. I would love to see.
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The white box PC look is like a disguise.
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...If they put THESE under the GPL, along with the T1, they'd be getting more press than they could imagine. If they used these a bit more aggressively - such as using them as a graphics processor on a PC - they'd be getting some amazing press. If they keep them locked in a server closet, it's only then that nobody will care.
I for one wish that they'd slap the UltraSPARC Niagara and its chipset on a standard ATX motherboard with PCI and PCI-Express support.
There'd be a Linux port in practically no time, and I know a bunch of us Linux power users would adopt that setup in no time... cheap commodity hardware coupled with a high-throughput RISC processor would be great for desktop multitasking, software development, file serving, etc.
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It'd be great if you could buy drop-in ATX boards with SPARC/MIPS/PowerPC/whatever processors. That might lead to the rapid demise of x86 if they performed well!
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I wish I could use water in my gas tank!
Exxon would be fucked!
Putting a Niagara on an ATX board is nothing like using water in your gas tank :-P
It would just require making a Niagara board of the appropriate size with the right power connectors, and the PCI/PCIe slots in the positions that PC users expect. When the PowerPC first came out, IBM envisioned that people would build computers with PC-type peripherals but PowerPC processors, so they developed the PowerPC Reference Platform [wikipedia.org]! It never took off commercially, unfortunately, but there's no technical reason why
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Maybe it would be easier to request Sun to make the T2 compatible with the AM2 socket. I know Sun is very familiar with Hypertransport, they could design this lowend proc to work in AMD compatible mobos with a compatible EFI BIOS. Maybe allow us to stick a T2 in a terranza socket for giggles. Why not?
You know, I hadn't thought of that, but it's a great point! The Hypertransport bus (AMD's design) was intended to be a *standardized* front-side bus, allowing different types of processors and coprocessors to work together. And Sun already builds systems around Opterons. If they made HyperTransport-enabled SPARC processors to fit Socket 940/Socket AM2, that'd be awesome... I could drop one in PC and not even change the RAM or motherboard, though the retarded PC BIOS would have to be replaced with some S
Good floating point too (Score:5, Interesting)
This processor will also have a floating-point unit for each core, unlike the UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) which only had one shared amongst all 8 cores. This should make it much more suitable than the T1 for a wide variety of applications. The T1 did great on multithreaded server-type tasks (e.g web, email, database) but would have been pretty hopeless for anything doing more than a bare minimum of FP work.
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On the other hand, SUN still suffers from the fact that ETCA is getting more and more mindshare in the telco arena which has been one of their major cash cows. It will be real interesting to see how that pans out in the end.
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All that and the 64 threads run at 84 watts maximum (not TDP).
http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/108/3/hw/17688 [systemnews.com]
Re:manages != runs, a.k.a. "the 64 threads bullshi (Score:3, Informative)
Quite t
Yes, but.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Yes, but.. (Score:4, Funny)
It has a Vista emulation mode - move the power switch to OFF and you get something just as useful but more stable.
Re:Yes, but.. (Score:4, Funny)
No, Vista requires 640 cores, which ought to be enough for anybody.
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Not quite.... [wikipedia.org], but it doesn't make it any less awesome.
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to see some benchmarks, and more technical specs, on these babies.
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If anybody is planning to benchmark this running common apps, I'd also be very interested to see how the approach to hiding memory latency works on more pedestrian applications like video encoding and pattern recognition (and maybe even thread-heavy GUI's).
IIRC (I researched this proc years ago for a University paper), it tries to hide latency by switching thread contexts whenever there is a cache miss or branch misprediction. The crossbar should help a little with cache-related stalls, but the core would
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Probably not applicable to any of the projects you're working on, but anyone writing Erlang code should check out the benchmarks from R11 running on the T1.
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It's a real question. I am curious.
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And the new Pragmatic Programmers book on Erlang will broaden it's exposure. http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/jaerlan g /index.html/ [pragmaticprogrammer.com]
It's not a commodity language yet, it seems to be on the upswing. It solves some very interesting multi-core/multi-machine problems with almost not effort on the part of the developer.
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Will it be water-cooled? (nt) (Score:3, Funny)
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Because they process information like water. (Score:2)
http://www.personaltours.ca/niagara-info.html [personaltours.ca]
Regurgitating "Quad" market speak (Score:5, Informative)
quad is a quad and I want a cheap 8-way desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
That said I've always wanted to get my hands on some of these new multicore UltraSparcs. I think they have a lot of potential, and the new ones seem extremely powerful.
Now if only Sun would but the low end one in a mac mini form factor and sell it as a java developers kit then maybe I could play with one. The low end sun fires are something I could almost afford, but I don't really want to keep a 1u on my desk just to try out the technology.
I think the big 64-bit address space and the ability to run lots of threads seems to fit well with Sun's Java. Not that I am a Java developer, I just think it's a good match, and it seems to be that's why people were using the older CoolThreads systems, enterprise Java.
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Note that the post was about the number of cores/threads in the Niagra chip design. In terms of chip design, the circuitry on the silicon is what matters, not how you package, integrate, or market it. Moreover, it does matter to a customer if marketing speak fobs him with two dualcore chips on a cracker instead of an integrated four core design.
Performance does not scale purely with the number of cores, it also matters how efficie
Re:quad is a quad and I want a cheap 8-way desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you on this point.
I don't agree with you here. What matters to the customer are costs and performance. They shouldn't have to care about how the package works, as long as it works correctly.
From Intel's perspective, they had two options:
From the customer's perspective, those two options correspond to:
What do you think Intel and their customers prefer?
Re:quad is a quad and I want a cheap 8-way desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
Thus it makes it a worthwhile design to go with. I could see it continuing too. Maybe their next gen chips are 4 cores on a single unit which goes mainstream, and then an 8 core 2 unit job for higher end stuff. At some point there may be too many cores per unit to do with without bus contention, but them maybe not since the speed of the bus keeps getting increased. Also I could see OSes being made aware of this, if it continues, and knowing that each X number of processors is a unit and you can shuffle all you like withing that, but shuffling across units incurs more penalties and thus isn't done unless it has to be. So if a process had 4 threads, and a unit was 4 cores, it'd make sure all the threads were running on the same unit.
Regardless, you are correct that at this point it is an excellent idea. Doesn't matter if it is the most technically correct solution or not, what matters is that it works well and is cheap.
We make concessions like that all the time in the computer world. Memory would be a good example. For a good while on desktops, memory, the FSB, and the processor ran at the same speed. You had a 30MHz 386, you were running 30MHz memory. Multipliers weren't a things you worried about. Then, we started to run in to limits of what memory could do. We could scale processors faster than RAM, or at least faster than RAM could be done cheaply. Thus the start of clock multiplied chips. This works, but at some point the memory is just too slow. So then we start getting in to tricks like DDR RAM, which transfers twice per clock cycle, and interleaving RAM, so that the processor has two channels to get faster access and so on. Currently you can have a CPU at one speed, an FSB at another, and memory at a third. Right now I've got a 2.66GHz CPU, a "1333MHz" FSB (it's not really 1333MHz, FSBs are quad pumped so it really runs at 333MHz) and "667MHz" RAM (again not really, it's DDR so the actual memory clock is 166MHz, bus clock is 333MHz, it just does 667 million data transfers per second hence the rate) and this is not an uncommon setup.
None of this is an ideal setup. Ideally, the FSB would run at the same speed as the processor and so would the RAM. This would lead to the processor having almost no wait time for memory data and very little need for trickery to try and prefetch data and such. However alas, if it were possible at all it would be too expensive to do. Thus we have this somewhat hacked solution. However in reality it matters little, though a hack it may be, it works real well. It has given us memory that can get the data to the CPU in a timely fashion and doesn't break the bank.
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I'd be glad to have any kind of 4-way SMP system. Whether they're all on different chips or all on the same, I'd still get 4 CPUs of processing power. Of course, inter-CPU communication makes a difference in certain applications, but people have worked with traditional SMP systems for decades, and we know how to make good use of them. Putting them on the same die won't solve the basic problems of parallelization.
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It's even better that you can have two boards like that side by side in 1U, had a few since early this year. For some things this Sun is really going to walk over a pile of processing nodes like that - but it won't be as cheap.
Oh no, not again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The quads from Intel provide four physical cores per socket. That is the definition of a quad in this context. The exact workings of how many bits of silicon there are, how they talk to each other and to the rest of the system is, to 99.999% of users and computer buyers, background fluff.
This was the same as when Intel put two single-core chips into a package to release a 'dual core'. Lots of people like you jumped up and down and pointed out it wan't *real* dual core, and how the FSB issue would cripple performance. Amazingly, it wasn't the case - they sold in droves, and real-world performance was good enough to carry Intel through to the 'true' dual core, the Core 2 Duo.
If the competition had anything out that was the same cost and performed significantly better than the 'fake' quad cores, you would have an argument. But they haven't and you don't. Bear in mind I'm talking about the huge x86/x64 market, not the relatively low volume non-x86 server market.
What Intel did back then and again now is perfectly sensible. They have millions of high yield, robust dual core chips being churned out, and they have built into the infrastructure the ability to put two into a package, lower the speed a bit to drop the per-core heat output, and sell reasonably priced (now) quad core chips. When the drop to 45nm happens, they will release their 'real' quad cores, and pretty quickly put two of those into a package to start selling oct-core (whatever we're going to call them). And so it goes.
What's the alternative? Not sell quads until 45nm comes out? Not working out too well for AMD is it? I've asked the question before here and on realworldtech.com - at what point will the FSB problem actually become a painful problem for the Intel chips? Well, not yet (4 core) is the answer, despite dire predictions from the AMD camp for years. My gues is that, shock of shocks, Intel have actually thought it through - and that's why CSI is coming. When the number of cores gets to the point where FSB will actually hurt performance relative to the AMD architecture, that's when CSI will kick in. Maybe at 8 cores, maybe at 16.
What, you don't need quad core yet? Fine, stop your bitching and choose what's right for you. Vive la difference, and 3 cheers for a market that gives us the choice.
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Well, yeah, and if I say the context is the motherboard, then I can define a four-socket board holding single-core CPUs to be a quad core chip. It would be equally ludicrous in the context of chip design.
I take it you haven't looked at proper SMP benchmarks. Sitting on the same FSB sucked rather badl
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But you are wrong from the consumer point of view.
I can get an inexpensive Intel system with four cores in a socket. That is a selling point.
I can get a two socket system with eight cores for not that much money as well.
What you will not see are people pushing four socket sixteen core systems that way. At that point yes the Intel two duels on a cracker falls apart.
BUT and this is a big BUT for a lot of people the Intel hack works and works well.
I do hope that AMD does well with their four core cp
on-chip 10G Ethernet ports (Score:2)
Re:on-chip 10G Ethernet ports (Score:5, Informative)
In the future, it is likely that all the wired buses in your motherboard will be replaced by an internal Ethernet-like network. We are already seeing a trend towards simpler and faster interconnects such as SATA. The next step is to use Ethernet-style connections for every chip-to-chip link, and within the chips themselves too. If this seems unlikely, consider that your PCs memory bus already is basically a network connection. The device at one end (CPU) is in a different clock domain to the device at the other (memory). Data is sent in packets (called bursts) to offset the latency of setting up a transfer.
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Freudian Processor? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Freudian Processor? (Score:5, Funny)
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AFAIK Viagra's only good for an hour or so.
Not going to be the fastest, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I think the Niagara is a pretty solid design, but it's not the processor to end all processors. For service workloads, I don't think you can get a better processor, but you probably don't want one of these processors in your workstation. Sun Microsystems is also headed in the right direction, establishing an open-community around these processors and Solaris.
Re:Not going to be the fastest, but... (Score:5, Informative)
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http://www.sun.com/2003-1014/feature/ [sun.com]
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This processor architecture absolutely rocks for the purpose it was intended, though. It consumes very little power, but handles service loads amazingly well. We also have a Sun v40z (8-core Opteron server) that would barely be able to keep up with the our T2000 (that's saying a lot)
A $16,000 machine barely keeps up with a $21,000 machine is saying a lot?
Sun Fire V40z Server
$ 16,995.00
4 Dual-Core AMD Opteron - Model 885
Sun Fire T2000 Server
$ 21,495.00
1 x 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 - 8 Core
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Interesting, comment about the crypto-processor, except SSL servers usually don't use much floating point (RSA key stuff is large integer mult/modulus stuff, not floating point) so I don't think this factoid is related to the FP performance of T1 (or T2). I always thought that sun had their crypt-accelerators as add-in system boards, hmm, I'll have to take
Niagara (Score:2, Funny)
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Maybe something like this [catb.org]?
2x10Gb Ethernet (Score:2)
If they made these CPUs cheap enough, we could put them on PCI-e cards in a Xeon, and run a Linux cluster over the PCI-e, coordinated by apps running on the Xeon. Or maybe stuff a Niagara/PCI-e box with extras, like we used to do with Mac Quadra 950/NuBus cards. But this time with 20Gbps ethernet per node,
The new Sun Moto: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like it's 1999 all-over again, except this time Sun actually has revenue in-line with expectations. I continue to maintain Sun is this century's Bell Labs and Xerox PARC all rolled into one.
These would make great backup servers (Score:2)
I could replace it, and get more throughput from a T2000, but the issue was doing restores would lose that edge from poor single thread performance
The Niagara 2 series is set to have 1.4X the single thread performance, plus the higher simultaneous threads (Though a slightly longer pipeline).
Since I am moving away from tape and going to Virtual Tape Library te
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However, I still don't plan on going T2000. The Niagara 2 should be a different platform and it will be interesting to see how that pans out.
Threads Are the Work of the Devil (Score:3, Funny)
Wow! Only 64 threads, eh? That's the problem with threads, you can't have too many of them because switching from one thread to another is very expensive, cycle-wise. In other words, as long as threads remain the only multitasking mechanism used by the computer industry, super fast, fine-grained multiprocessing will remain a dream. It gets worse. There is another problem with threads that is even worse than this. Threads are inherently asynchronous. Until and unless the computer industry comes to its senses and realizes that asynchronous processing makes it impossible to implement programs with deterministic timing, we will continue to pay the heavy price of software unreliability. Switch to a non-algorithmic, signal-based, synchronous software model (with the supporting CPU architecture), and the problem will disappear. Threads suck! Period. One man's opinion.
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Parent: "Hey, would you like to .."
14-yo: "You hate me, don't you! I wish I wasn't born!"
Re:Sun doesn't get much processor press (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, if the last thing you have touched is a V440 then you are not exactly up to speed with the cutting edge of Sun products. I promise you that if you had actually ever seen a system running a T1 chip you would not say "their processor division has been kinda lagging". The cool threads stuff is amazing and they are the only people doing anything quite like it. I am not sure if you picked this up from the article but with one chip you get _64_ hardware based threads.
In our internal benchmarks a £20k T2000 with 1 x 8 core T1 outperformed a £100k+ V880 with 8 x 2 core Sparc. Freakin' cool and excellent value for money. Plus all this fits in two rack units.
Working in small companies is nice but I promise you that out there in the big wide world "most" companies don't think that $US20k is very much at all to spend on a system that will be part of a critical service.
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I promise you that if you had actually ever seen a system running a T1 chip you would not say "their processor division has been kinda lagging".
I disagree. The T1 is absolutely incredible engineering for certain workloads, but before that I can't even remember the last competitive chip they put out, and now Alpha is officially dead I consider SPARC to be the most interesting surviving architecture, so I've been paying attention.
Rock and T2 look very promising, but before that their processor division was lagging so badly they were putting re-badged Fujitsu chips in their high-end machines to try to stay competitive. Between the end of the dot
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Sun's stuff are slower than IBM's POWER line, and they are nowhere in the same league as IBM mainframes, and IBM mainframes are not in the same league as real nonstop computing clusters.
Mainframes = very good uptimes, but you have _scheduled_ downtimes.
Stuff like OpenVMS or Tandem = uptimes of _decades_ possible, don't even need scheduled downtimes where you turn everything off, y
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http://www50.sap.com/benchmarkdata/sd2tier.asp
And you'll see what I meant about Sun being squished between x86 and IBM. Look at the T1 showings (add the 4 linked entries together to get the total performance, or go for the single one at: http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert470 5.pdf).
Compare with x86 or IBM POWER or even Fujitsu's 2 year old stuff (http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert13 05.pdf).
Go compare the S
Re:Sun doesn't get much processor press (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Sun is not trying to win the hearts and minds of home users - that is not their market. Sun would see few benefits from pushing their products in the mainstream media. Trade press is where they reach the decision makers. How many Oracle adverts do you see in game magazines and tabloid newspapers? Not very many, they tend to advertise in business oriented outlets such as The Economist.
2) Some small businesses don't care about computers at all. The companies that need Sun will buy Sun. The companies who can run their business out of a box of post-it notes will do the former.
3) When you buy mission critical hardware, you don't look for a '3 year warranty'. You look for a service and support contract based on how critical the hardware is to your business. If you can run your business on a home-made 486dx system running Minix then that is probably the best option.
4) Sun being worth 10% of Intel is irrelevant. The Economist sells far fewer copies than The Sun (a pretty terrible UK tabloid) but I know which one I'd chose for a serious overview of world news.
5) This is a techie web site so news like this seems pretty relevant here, even if most of us can't afford to buy the kit.
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Point 2 should have read:
"2) Some small businesses don't care about computers at all. The companies that need Sun will buy Sun. The companies who can run their business out of a box of post-it notes will do the *latter*."
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He wasn't tr
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The other point made above is that Sun realized a long time ago that they can't compete margin-wise with Intel on the desktop CPU market. Way back when, Sun's revenue used to be
Actally, SUNW stands for.... (Score:2)
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Guess I have to hand in my Sun CSA now......
Re:Sun doesn't get much processor press (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all realative. Your 'high performance' Dell or Gateway wouldn't do much other then run bind at one of our locations. You are comparing apples to oranges. These systems are not for you to surf the net with, and as for price, well there is a lot to be gained from stability. I still have sparc systems with OEM (minus the disks) that are close to 20 years old running at some locations. Bet your Dell can't say that.
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But saying they don't get press is a misnomer. They do get press - in the publications that matter to their market. You'll find ads and articles for Sun in places like CIO magazine, Infoworld, and Information Week. Tom's Hardware, in the big scheme of things, is great for commodity hardware review, but when you'r
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most people just don't care about them. Tom's Hardware is not going to be reviewing them for the enthusiast market, for example, they are waaaaay out of that range. Same shit with the Power 6. Great chip, coming never to a desktop near you. These specialised high end products are just not of mass interest if for no other reason than price.
Which Sun has never cared about. They sell to the high performance market, which (outside of trivially distributed applications like serving Web pages or rendering CG) NEEDS the kind of horsepower than Suns can crank out.
Even if that cheap server breaks right at the end of its warranty, it is still a money saver, a big one.
This is almost always a red herring. Price of a system is rarely a company's most significant cost (within an order of magnitude) when you're dealing with high performance computing. It's the people and the data vendor relationships that usually cost you the bulk of your outlay. Hardware
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They sent me a Sunfire last year telling me it had capabilities it didn't. I sent it back. If $21,500 is the price tag, then this would outperform what I was considering at approximately the same price. I doubt these have the capabilities I was looking for, (I want Windows in Xen) but the price isn't going to be it's limiting factor.
By the way, if they're still running it, the Try and Buy program is every bit as good as it sounds. They shipped me a server for the asking, I tested it, and sent it back, all
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Linspire (back in the day - I've been on Ubuntu for quite a while now) worked this way. IIRC you had to hold down a key to rescan for hardware, otherwise it assumed nothing changed and booted very briskly. I'm surprised it didn't catch on with more popular distros.
Also, I thought http://www.linuxbios.org/Welcome_to_LinuxBIOS [linuxbios.org] would get through POST and to the payload in just a couple of seconds.