New Server Chip Niagara

* * Beatles-Beatles writes "Sun recently announced their latest release in server technology. The UltraSparc T1 processor, code-named Niagara, has eight computing engines on a single chip, with each core capable of handling up to four tasks at once." With this new processor Sun hopes to get a leg up on the competition. The Niagra chip is being billed as an "eco-friendly" chip because of its low power requirements. From the article: " [...] removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees."

raw power

[emptybody]

Niagara systems take the concept of dual core processors (with which most of you are familiar), and goes to an absolute extreme - building 8 cores, each capable of running 4 jobs simultaneously (4 threads), onto a single chip. Doing the math, we'll be delivering a 32-way chip, running 9.6GHz, which sips power (about 70 watts). [sun.com], JonathanSchwartz BLOG.

This is why I got into Sysadmin 15 years ago.
To play with big honkin fast machines and new technology that makes your head spin.
Just musing about the name. Think of your kitchen sink faucet.
Now think of all the faucets in your house turned on at once.
Now think of all the faucets on your street turned on too.
Add all the faucets in your community.
Keep on thinking of how many faucets in how many communities it would take to equal the raw power behind something so large as Niagra falls.

Am I hooked?
You bet.

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how they calculated that figure... can someone convert to LoC please?

Here's some info on Carbon Neutral Calculations: http://www.menofthetrees.com.au/calculations.html [menofthetrees.com.au]

Re:Easy

[Moby Cock]

I doubt they considered the enegy expended in creating this new design and manufacturing this new design. I'd like to see how they came up with such nonsense.

Massively multi-core x86s

[rbanffy]

AMD or VIA would build a cheap multi-core x86 based on VIA's or Geode cores... Sun could sell systems with them as developer boxes running Solaris 10.

BTW, what would happen to performance if you started with a Geode core and spent the rest of your wafer-area budget with Itanic-size caches?

For now, I have no hope to have one of these on my desktop anytime soon.

Re:What about I/O?

[HaydnH]

Sun always builds their systems to be balanced and avoid bottlenecks, it's the first thing you learn about on the internal training courses so needless to say the I/O is fast enough. [sun.com]

Haydn.

Re:nasty stuff

[youngerpants]

Arsenic = Naturally occuring substance (you know when potatoes grow a green scum... thats arsenic)

Acid = Oh no, not acid, which type, I really hope it isnt ascorbic acid, nasty that one, I try to avoid it at all costs... hey, my teeth have all fallen out

Re:Right.

[mwvdlee]

"[...] removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees."

Removing the world's Web servers and not replacing them at all would have an even better effect on carbon dioxide emissions.

I'm curious as to how they calculated it, though. Are they talking 1 year running time or 100? Are they taking into account the energy required to build those new systems? Do they supply the new hardware's manuals on paper? How does it compare to a similar scenario using other replacement hardware?

Ultrasparc III Cores

[the eric conspiracy]

The Niagara uses Ultrasparc III type cores which have limited single thread performance. This limits this design to certain applications that are highly concurrent in nature. More interesting is the Next Gen Rock CPU which will have highly parallel Rock CPUs.

Why is it named Niagra?

[Unnamed Chickenheart]

...is it good at memory leakage? ^_^

Or is it perhaps not as low-power as they clame: maybe it require a huuuge current? ^_^

One should carefully name ones product. Its fate may stand or fall on it ^_^

Re:nasty stuff

[AKAImBatman]

I like Sun hardware, always have. But what happens when in "just a couple of years", these Sun chips aren't all that fast anymore? Do you keep them around just because you paid a lot for them?

I don't know about you, but I can always find a use for a Sun machine. They're built to last, and can often still be useful for a decade after their manufacture. The worst case is that you can resell your old machines to a refurbisher like AnySystem [anysystem.com] so that it can gain new life in someone else's possession. I know of plenty of companies where the AnySystem servers are powerhouses for the work they need to do. I also know of a lot of developers and sysadmins who would like a Sun Workstation, but can't afford new. Again, AnySystem (or Ebay, take your pick) can provide them with a system that meets or exceeds their needs. :-)

Re:Right.

[Anarke_Incarnate]

At least in the US, money is printed on cotton pulp and not wood pulp.

Re:What about I/O?

[loose_cannon_gamer]

Ahhhhh, I find that parent very informative indeed. So this is really like 8 cores and quad level hyperthreading, where the first thread will be running 70%+ of the time, and the second thread will get scheduled when the first thread blocks, and run for 25% of the time, and the third thread will get scheduled when the first two are both blocked, and run for 4.8% of the time, and that fourth thread, well, 0.2% is all it gets. (And yes, I just pulled these numbers out of the air).

Just out of curiousity, shouldn't there be some kind of 'quality of service' notion when claiming how many threads you run simultaneously? I just seem to recall that hyperthreading on the P4 gives about a 15% throughput increase with a second thread, and I can't imagine that you get anything other than similarly diminishing returns if all four threads are fighting for the same memory bandwidth and execution units.

Just to explain, it is my understanding that hyperthreading is little more than opportunistic hardware level thread scheduling -- while one is blocked on I/O or something, two can use the same execution units *carefully* to accomplish work. If my analysis is right, and I could be out in space, you might as well build a chip that can run 1024 or 1048576 threads simultaneously (sure, you need a little extra hardware per thread), but you're still only going to see work get done by the first 2, maybe 3, although I doubt even that many.

Re:Not appropriate for all types of workloads

[juancn]

Not necessarily, at the time of this writting, my desktop machine has 510 threads belonging to 48 processes (I'll grant you that is not a typical setting, it is a development workstation).

Single threaded applications are pretty rare, most modern applications have more than one path of execution (you cannot afford to freeze the screen while saving for example). Network I/O is much easier to program with threading, in oposition from asynchronous I/O (think a browser with several tabs/windows open).

I wouldn't so lightly assume that multi-threading support is only desirable for server systems.

Anyway, this has been designed mostlly for servers, consider that a typical Java server will have around 50-100 threads (maybe more than 300). This is where this technology makes more sense.