Sun Firms Up Its Sparc Chip Plans

delirium of disorder writes "Despite their recent focus on Opteron-based servers, Sun has not given up on SPARC. Niagara , the latest development in the SPARC line, will have 8 cores and according to this article will consume about 56 watts and have performance comparable to a four-way SMP Xeon system. New Xeons will consume hundreds of watts per processor."

Niagra? like Viagra?

[nsaneinside]

So it's supposed to help Sun with its, er, problems?

Re:Niagra? like Viagra?

[FidelCatsro]

No Niagara as in falls , Viagra is meant to reduce those

SPARC has always been

[VolciMaster]

a really well-designed architecture. I haven't had much cahnce to futz with it due to cost of the equipment, but the chips are erally powerful. Loads of cache, lots and lots of registers, few instructions (God bless RISC), and a really wide data path. I hope this can spark some new life into the company.

Sun's huge investment into Java and Solaris hasn't thrilled me (I personally haven't really found Java all that interesting), and I prefer to use Linux, though their recent Open Solaris project does look interesting. Maybe if they'd focused more on hardware they wouldn't have needed to use the Opterons in as a large a role as they have. The Opteron (an AMD64 in general) is a nice architecture, getting the benefits of really wide data paths and decent amounts of cache, but is still stuck with not many GPRs and that pesky x86 compatibility. Being able to run old software natively instead of through some kludge of a compatibility layer (Itanium) is a Good Thing (tm) when it comes to getting people to move to your hardware, however, I hope AMD has the decency to kill of x86 in a couple years, once 'everybody' has made the switch.

I'm looking forward to seeing this new SPARC in the real world, to see how it stacks up against other CPUs.

Re:SPARC has always been

[unfall]

While the registers visible are limited to 16 in 64bit mode there are way more registers available to the cpu via register renaming. It does add a bunch of transistors but its no longer killing the performance. More AMD64 Info [chip-architect.com]

Im excited

[Markus_UW]

Looks like Sun might finally be able to drag itself out of the hole it's got itself in, eh?

8 cores...ouch

[vdthemyk]

Ok, so an 8 core processor to function at the level of a 4 way xeon processor. Hmmm, I'm sure Oracle users will be sure to run their apps on this architecture!

So, instead of paying $80k in licensing, they can pay $160k! (at about $20k per core for Enterprise Oracle DB).

With most enterprise level apps going to a per core licensing structure (and if per user, they usually limit that to 4 cores to a system), I don't see the benefit in having a really powerful and possibly expensive http server.

Front page?

[guacamole]

Why is this story not linked from slashdot's front page? Is the Firefox multi-link store that a lot more relevant or interesting than this?

Key Meeting Transcript

[superpulpsicle]

Exec: What's today?

Employee: Monday.

Exec: Oh, we need to launch Ultrasparc as the top processor! What's tomorrow?

Employee: Tuesday

Exec: Oh we really need to launch AMD Opteron as the top processor. What's the day after?

Employee: Wednesday.

Exec: We need to make StorageTek and tape libraries our key future. What's the day after?

Employee: Saturday.

Exec: Great, I got a golfing trip.