Is Sun's Niagara Server Viagra? 190
argonaut writes "Ace's Hardware has an in-depth article on Niagara -- Sun's upcoming parallel server processor with 8 cores and 4 threads each. The article discusses the chip's radical architecture and what kind of performance can be expected from it in traditionally thread-heavy server applications like web hosting, databases, and other multi-user applications. Given the recent cancellation of the UltraSPARC V, it seems this is going to be Sun's new direction for its in-house CPU design efforts. Furthermore, both Intel and IBM are working on other highly parallel processors and AMD is expected to eventually introduce a dual-core Opteron. So, will more threads prop up Sun's performance?"
Memory subsystem? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope that they've made some vast improvements or they're gonna have some serious issues feeding that beast. Systems now, even the Opteron which is among the better mem controllers around for a commodity processor, still have issues with wait states. Uberthreading it and dumping more cores on the chip will only make the situation worse unless they do a serious upgrade of the memory controller.
If they do not, why pay bazillion bucks for a processor that is idle for most of the time?
Unfortunately (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how impressive the architecture happens to be, it will be evaluated by comparing it with a rack of P4's.
How many Power server systems does IBM ship compared with x86 systems?
Revenue per system might be better for high end systems, but the volume - the market size - is just not growing.
Sun no longer belongs in the processor design (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This could be HUGE (Score:1, Insightful)
lol! Yes, they've done some really innovative things lately, like packaging GNOME and selling it as the "Sun Java Desktop". Innovation gone wild! Under 18 not admitted...
And the vaunted "3D desktop" that isn't nearly as polished as http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/ from the looks of both of them AND has yet to come up with any practicality for the loss of CPU cycles. ( I'm not one of those idiots that still thinks Java is the beast it used to be in terms of running, but a 3D desktop can't SAVE any CPU time. )
Re:Of course this will be the direction Sun goes i (Score:3, Insightful)
$34,000 - $20,000 = $14,000
That's $14,000 that they would lose in profits if they were to compete by matching the price of the commodity system. Depending on the actual costs of making that system, this sort of sacrifice in profits may be very unreasonable for them.
The "commodity" bit merely means that there's a fair number of players in this market for a product competing mostly based on price. It does not necessarily mean that you're going to get your high preformance computer for the same price as your desktop PC.
Re:Viagra? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:'taint no CPU advances going to help Sun now (Score:1, Insightful)
I think their approach is more flexible since you can run different speed cpus in the same server. This flexibility comes at a price though since the backplane speed is not increased for faster processors.