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."

Sun has the fix for global warming!

[sgtboost]

Just buy their new processor...it's equivalent to planting a megajillion trees!

Re:Sun has the fix for global warming!

[beh]

Unfortunately, it won't solve the global warming problem - because if everyone switched their web servers to the Sun machines, that would only be used as an excuse to log another million trees for some short-sighted profit...

nasty stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all the real nasty chemicals that go into the manufacturing process of chips .. eg arsenic and acid !!!

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:nasty stuff

[moro_666]

indeed, you have acid's all over the place.

alcohol is acid, quite a weak one, but still having the effects and reactions as the rest of acids have.
most of the batteries that you throw into your ipod contain acid, so does the battery in your car.
if you let CO2 and water together, they create a nice (and a bit unstable) carbonic acid, and that is basically all over the place.
even your body contains so many acids that i would get a ban on slashdot for even naming all of these.
compared to the acids created by gasoline engines and powerstations in the atmosphere, the electionics production isn't even worth mentioning.

sun is making the right move, more computing power for less watt-per-hour, and if they can spare the energy used during producing too, it's even better (and more profitable for them, since they pay for that). having a 200W P4 screaming under your table just to play solitaire is really wicked from the energetic point of view. so is driving an engine overbloated suv just to get one fat butt from one place to another. regular swedish buses that carry 30 people have the same size of engines as hummers or corvettes, sniffing the word 'wasted' anywhere ?

while this cpu will be nogood for playing doom3, it will be a very good chip for handling many many many threads'n'processes at once and therefor be ideal for running webservers and mailservers and other type of multiple client handling services. way to go sun, i hope amd will do an amd athlon 64 X32 some time soon too :)

too bad i can't afford this stuff anytime soon :(

sadly when you are interested in the price of the latest server, you're not rich enough to buy it

Re:nasty stuff

[moro_666]

playing doom versus serving multiple clients, as a dedicated server, the latter one is clearly the other case that i pointed out.

i guess doom3 server is a mixture of handling multiple clients and 1 heavy weight calculation algorithm with vectors ... if this is the case, and amd athlon x2 will outperform this slick sun cpu , since 1 core in this sun miracle doesnt have the power of 1 core in amd. ofcourse if they would have a thread with less killing algorithms it would be good for the sun cpu, but it would

Re:nasty stuff

[Yokaze]

> Naturally occuring substance

It always puzzles me, how people think, that natural is some indicator for being harmless. You know, like: "Here my love, take that medecine, it is made from plants, perfectly harmless, all natural", which triggers my reposte, "So, is a cup of hemlock ".

What puzzles me even more, is that you take such a perfect counter-example [wikipedia.org] as an argument.

Re:nasty stuff

[TeknoHog]

> Naturally occuring substance

It always puzzles me, how people think, that natural is some indicator for being harmless.

Moreover, it's nigh impossible to define substances as 'natural' and 'unnatural'. IMHO, nature == the universe, and everything that exists is natural -- whether or not manufactured by individuals of a certain species. Things that don't exist are supernatural :)

Re:nasty stuff

[wytcld]

Chips will be manufactured anyway. The question is what the useful lifetime of the chips that are manufactured is, and what the power consumption of those chips over their lifetime will be, in ratio to the work they perform.

Sparc's strength in the early Internet days was always throughput - even under load - rather than speed. Sun also built more reliable hardware. I switched from Sun to AMD/Linux for Webservers early on, but with energy costs rising quickly, I'll be taking another look at Sun. Where these probably can matter most is for large Web farms, which currently tend to be commodity Linux boxen. But those are throw-away machines - chips headed onward to the landfill after just a couple years.

Re:nasty stuff

[cbreaker]

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?

That's the *benefit* of the so-called throw away machines. They're cheap. They are pretty fast. Lots and lots of bang for the buck. If you go with a really expensive Sun box, you can't do that.

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 p

Re:nasty stuff

[InvalidError]

"Sparc's strength in the early Internet days was always throughput - even under load"

Are you implying that you can have useful throughput under no load? How do you measure this idle throughput advantage?

The Intel/AMD architectures are historically single-threaded desktop-centric where the most important thing usually is to run one thing really fast. Sun, however, was always in the HPC/workstation game where overall throughput matters most, latencies and single-thread performance be damned. These two groups were playing pretty different games up to recently.

But now, Intel/AMD have hit a GHz and complexity brick wall. They are forced to promote multi-threading multi-core at the desktop-level and optimize their future desktop chip designs for multi-threaded application throughput rather than single-threaded performance. Imagine what would happen if AMD and Intel could afford to quit competing on single-threaded performance overnight: goodbye complex deep out-of-order execution, goodbye branch-prediction and speculative execution - those transistors would be much better spent on implementing quad-threading cores to keep every pipeline filled with useful instructions that will retire cleanly on every clock.

Sacrificing single-thread performance for simultaneous multi-threaded throughput in the above-described way has been the name of Sun's game for the last few years.

Obsession with single-threaded performance is what costs current x86 CPUs the most power. Of course, in the P4/HT case, there is the added power and transistor costs of trying to be a jack-of-all-trades who predictably turned out as a master-of-none. (The P4's uOP replay engine is a neat idea... but re-executing the same stupid uOPs until they meet retirement conditions is woefully wasteful, whoever designed and bothered to patent this should be fired.)

Re:nasty stuff

[MECC]

A friend of mine was showing me a chip fabricating lab, and pointed out an alarm that went off if there was an accidental release of a certain chemical. He also pointed out that if that alarm were to go off, only people right next to the exit would survive....

My link to the abc news business section?

[brejc8]

There must be 100 better sources [google.co.uk] out there to link to.

Easy

[Laz10]

Let's go plant some trees then.

It is a pretty safe bet that 1 million trees are way cheaper than Sun technology.

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.

Re:Easy

[AvitarX]

First, they bent over. Then they reached in their ass. Lastly they published it as fact.

Re:Easy

[timeOday]

I wish we could just ignore their eco-friendly marketing spin and get down to whether the chip is any good. 8 quad-hyperthread cores sounds pretty intriguiging to me. I'd like to try out make -j32 on this puppy.

Sounds like an anti-slogan

[suso]

How about: I'd rather plant a tree than run on a Sun.

Re:Easy

[jacksonj04]

Just a thought here, but since when has planting trees reduced carbon emissions?

Re:Easy

[Chmarr]

They didn't say it would reduce carbon emissions. They said it would "Have the same effect on carbon emissions" as planting 1 million trees. Because, ya know, trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The USA is actually a net carbon SINK, rather than a carbon SOURCE. This is one of the reasons the USA didn't sign the Kyoto treaty; the treaty doesn't take into account consumers of atmospheric carbon, only producers.

Re:Easy

[DJStealth]

I'm not an ecologist or anything, but planting trees cannot reduce emissions.

The definition of emissions, means the product being emitted. Planting a tree does not reduce CO2 being emitted. Although it probably does 'eat up' the CO2, reducing the amount of the gas in the air.

Arbor Day Foundation

[jbeaupre]

If you're willing to do the planting, the National Arbor Day Foundation will send you 10 trees for $10. http://www.arborday.org/shopping/Memberships/membe rships.cfm [arborday.org] Get 10% of the registered users on Slashdot to sign up for this (and plant them) and you're close to a million.

Re:Or even easier....

[nelsonal]

Please mod this up, recycling paper has zero impact on cutting of forests, paper pulp "trees" are grown on farms.

Better link

[Anonymous Coward]

Better link here [sun.com].

Right.

[Skye16]

" [...] 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."

I'm sure it would. But then, after replacing all these servers with the UltraSparc T1-based systems, we'd have to cut down 1 million trees just to print the money Sun would be making back in profit. Weeee!

Re:Right.

[Sockatume]

Curses, beaten to it. You ommited the golden phrase "gigantic sacks of cash" though.

Re:Right.

[FooAtWFU]

Yes, because when I order a server over the mail or the internet, I pay only in $1 bills, because I want to keep myself safe from identity theft. Paper money... I love it! 3

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?

Re:Right.

[Skye16]

Also, what kind of trees are we talking? What size/age? Are we talking lil' 3' high sprouts? Or 100 year old oaks?

Re:Right.

[Hoi Polloi]

Sadly, all of the new Sun CPUs are made out of wood.

Re:Right.

[Anarke_Incarnate]

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

Re:Right.

[Chilles]

No no no, the meant to say that they care so much about the environment that they will give you one of these UltraSparc T1 based systems if you turn in two of your devices capable of serving web pages.

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:raw power

[rkhalloran]

For a lot of uses today, a swarm of processors like this makes more sense than driving one CPU hellishly fast so it can task-switch quick enough to get around to everything.

Sun traditionally has been very good at engineering the interconnects so I expect the actual throughput on this is pretty good.

Will be interesting to see how well this does.

Re:raw power

[mcrbids]

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.

Dude. The water in my house all comes thru a 3/4" pipe. Turning all the faucets on would mean that they all dribble. Turn on the whole neighborhood, and

What about I/O?

[Max Romantschuk]

Eight cores at four threads is 32 simultaneous threads. Nice, but what about memory bandwith? Each thread needs proper I/O if this is actually going to do any good... Anyone have any real info on this marchitecture?

Re:What about I/O?

[SQL Error]

Specs here [sun.com]. Four 144-bit DDR2-533 interfaces. That's more memory bandwidth than a quad-Opteron system.

Re:What about I/O?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"That's more memory bandwidth than a quad-Opteron system."

Yes, but with considerably more latency. DDR2 is great until you realize that the latency effectively kills any performance advantage you had with higher clocks. DDR2-533 is about as fast as DDR-400.

Re:What about I/O?

[Paul Jakma]

The whole point of Niagara is to get higher throughput *despite* memory latencies.

Re:What about I/O?

[fitten]

I haven't looked at the actual timings, but the vast majority of memory operations are on cache lines. So, you have to use some math to determine how fast a cache line is filled using each technology to see what the difference is. It isn't all about the time to get the first byte in, it's about getting the cache line in (which is 256 bits - 2x128-bit reads on our favorite x86 machines). DDR will still be a little faster, I'm guessing, but the initial read latency is amortized over the two reads in a dual

Re:What about I/O?

[photon317]

The new Opterons on the new socket architecture actually will have DDR2, it was just announced publicly a week ago or so.

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:What about I/O?

[the eric conspiracy]

The 4 threads per core is designed exactly for that issue. If a thread is waiting for memory, execution can proceed on a different thread.

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, s

Dumb

[pubjames]

Dear Sun,

RE: your statement:

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.

Please engage brain before opening mouth.

Thanks.

Comparisons to the cell?

[Anonymous Coward]

These processors are a step in a different direction. Like the cell processor, they lack features like branch prediction, have small, very simple pipelines, etc. However, that isn't really all that bad, esp. on some tasks where your CPU is mostly just idling waiting for IO to finish anyway. I wonder if these "simple but gets the job done" CPUs will see an even wider market in the future. As the article said, they are cheaper and consume less power than their competitors

Re:Comparisons to the cell?

[Quicksilver]

Not really the same thing at all. The cell uses one master to control several specialized units. Niagara is just what is sounds like. 8 cores on 1 piece of silicon. They all are the same and the all can run any Sparc code.... unlike the Cell which isn't compatible with anything and each unit can only work on what it is specialized in.

Re:Comparisons to the cell?

[t35t0r]

The Cell is an asynchronous SMP and the SunT1 is a synchronous SMP machine. The Cell processor has one master CPU with multiple "DSP" [wikipedia.org] chips or cores. The SunT1 has multiple CPU cores.

And...

[Moby Cock]

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

"And it has the added benefit of lining my pocket."

Re:And...

[popeyethesailor]

And probably bankrupt atleast a million small-medium web hosts ;)

Impractical

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know many people who have a server room large enough to hold a million trees.

(twiddles thumbs for the remaining 17 seconds. Lahdy dahdy hum dum dum)

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:Massively multi-core x86s

[tomstdenis]

Dude, a PPC 440 is 6mm^2 and consumes 700mW of power at 667Mhz. You could easily fit a dozen on a die the size of a P4 and still take FAR less than this Niagra core. At a rated 1200MIPS per core a die with eight of them would net you close to 9600MIPS max. Of course you'd need some form of L2 cache and high speed internal bus.

Similar the new ARM cores Cortex [arm.com] it takes roughly the same power at 1Ghz which gives it apparently 2000MIPS. The area is about the same as PPC 440. So in theory you could hook 4-8 of these up as well and get a killer chip too..

Point is Suns quotes of being "2 possibly 3 generations ahead" is totally bullshit. They're at most one generation ahead. It takes one multi-core ARM or PPC to totally destroy this.

Tom

Re:Massively multi-core x86s

[mritunjai]

" At a rated 1200MIPS per core a die with eight of them would net you close to 9600MIPS max. Of course you'd need some form of L2 cache and high speed internal bus."

Cache is not as small issue as you think. In most modern processors, 50%-75% of die is taken by cache alone. So do you math again taking half to quarter of die size.

Re:Massively multi-core x86s

[tomstdenis]

Law of diminishing returns?

Compare a 2MB L2 cache on a P4 to a box with 1MB of L2 or 512K ... the cache ends up contributing less and less to the overall performance.

What is also important is associativity. If you have a low-assoc cache, meaning a given address has few places in the cache it could reside you end up wasting more space. That's why [iirc] the AMD processors have high associvity L2 caches. They make good use of the 512K available.

At my previous job we built Gentoo distros on 128 and 256K sem

The lowdown

[gtoomey]

http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/specs. xml [sun.com]

Since the story is devoid of content:
- up to 8 cores, 4 threads per core
- integrated RSA
- 3MB L2 cache
- 90nm process
- 1.2 GHz

Re:The lowdown

[southpolesammy]

Since the story is devoid of content...

No worries, since most of the comments here (excepting yours) have also been devoid of content.

Re:The lowdown

[imsabbel]

You are also missing that those cores are single inssue in order, IIRC.
So 4 opteron cores have the same numbers of clocks than a Niagara, but can do a LOT more per clock.
But otoh, the targets are vastly different, so both solution could have their place...

Not appropriate for all types of workloads

[XNormal]

You need at least a dozen concurrent threads or processes before you can make good use of this CPU's power. Certainly not a good idea for desktops. An excellent match for web servers. Other server-type workloads (e.g. database, file server) may need some tuning to make the best of this architecture.

Re:Not appropriate for all types of workloads

[Knetzar]

I'm pretty sure Sun is aiming this at the J2EE space.

Re: appropriate for all types of workloads

[davecb]

My workstation is running 72 threads, and top (prstat) says that seven of them are active while I'm browsing, sending email and watching a script on a remote machine run...

Sounds like I could use 8 threads minumum, way more if I'm unit-testing a three-tier app.

PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP
1139 davecb 101M 87M run 49 0 0:04:58 4.6% mozilla-bin/6
480 root 56M 44M sleep 49 0 0:03:39 2.1% Xsun/1
700 davecb 15M 10M sleep 59 0 0:00:13 0.8% gnome-terminal/1
692 davecb 9

Re: appropriate for all types of workloads

[LeninZhiv]

Um, yeah, but given that your two most strenuous processes are using 4% and 2% of your CPU respectively, with your machine posting mighty load averages of 0.33, 0.30, 0.18, I think you can safely hold off on upgrading to an 8-core processor any time soon--unless some of those threads aren't sleeping fast enough for you :-)

Re:Not appropriate for all types of workloads

[root_42]

You need at least a dozen concurrent threads or processes before you can make good use of this CPU's power. Certainly not a good idea for desktops.

Not for the average Joe's desktop. But definitely a good developer workstation. Concurrent compiling... It might also be quite nice as a graphics workstation. If you have a threaded rendering application, this would also be nice.

Re:Not appropriate for all types of workloads

[zerocool^]

What I'm thinking is VMWare-type virtualization.

I recently was hired by the CS department at a major university, and they're looking into a way to replace the rows and rows of desktops in a cs lab with a fewer amount of servers, while at the same time, being able to give their students access to the entire OS. Getting one dedicated server per student wouldn't fly, but something like this running vmware, or a small cluster running usermode linux would allow for quite a few small virtual machines.

I'm intrigu

The processor after this

[Xerp]

Will obviously have the name "C1ala1s"

A new measure of CPU performance...the tree (T)

[ip_freely_2000]

We can add this performance criteria to our system selection process...how many trees are saved. Featuring the Sun chip which is the world's first Megatree (MT) performer.

Why I remember when I was a lad we had Kilotree performers, and we were glad for it!!!

Re:A new measure of CPU performance...the tree (T)

[amliebsch]

They weren't talking about saving trees (since we don't get our electricity from wood-burning power plants), they were talking about saving CO2 emissions. Since trees absorb CO2, it's a measure of how many trees it would take to absorb the CO2 emitted by the burning of fuel sufficient to power the chips. So it's really more of a "Tree-Reduction Equivalency Estimate". In this case, one MegaTREE.

Misread Code Name

[FJ]

Am I the only one who read the code name as Viagra?

I knew sun was having troubles but not THAT kind of trouble.

Re:Misread Code Name

[ceeam]

Well, Suns are quite well-known for their decent uptimes!

Re:Misread Code Name

[frank_adrian314159]

I heard they were having problems keeping their margins up.

carbon dioxide emissions , errr O.....K

[zenst]

UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees.

Thats great but did they offset all the marketing bumf about this; Now that surely made large dent into those newly planted tree's - caching in before even planted some might say.

There is also the factor of all the extra web/page hits and respective computer power and as such extra carbon dioxide ommisions related to that.

So in the end to be truly green you would just release the product and keep s

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.

The Spelling of NIAGARA

[CrazySpence]

It is not Niagra. Thank you

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:Why is it named Niagra?

[Black Perl]

As I'm responding to this, the ad box is running a Sun ad that states, "No wonder their name rhymes with Hell...". So I would conclude that Sun tends to pay attention to what the names rhyme with.

Also, Sun is pressing the reliability aspect of their solutions. Therefore, I'm willing to bet that Sun is hoping people will connect "Niagra" with a rhyming word with the connotation "stays up a long time." I'm not quite sure what that word would be, however. :-)

p.s. actually they seem to be using Niagara. Perhaps

New server chip Viagra

[ardchoille]

Whoa, talk about "uptime".

Mandatory sed quote

[fm2503]

s/n/v/

Competition

[hackstraw]

With this new processor Sun hopes to get a leg up on the competition.

Oh, instead of the previous attempt to get a leg "up" on the competition with the "if you can't beat them, join them" method like: http://www.sun.com/x64/ [sun.com]

Before anybody gets weird on me, I am not an AMD fanboy. I am kinda a Sun fanboy, but I have been very critical of them in recent years for a reason. They have been for years watering down their name and reputation. Hopefully this new chip is in the right direction. We will see. Ultr

In other news

[frostfreek]

Sun announced today, that they will be chopping down one tree for every new system sold!

Am I the only one...

[Cow Jones]

... who misread the topic "New Server Chip Niagara" as "New Super Cheap Viagra"?
That would at least be an honest slashvertisments for a change.

Buy the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

I just noticed that a Sparc "Ultra 5" goes for $60 on eBay these days. What's the bang:buck ratio of a U5:$60 compared to the most economical of these new T1s? Because the right programming can get multiprocessing from a LAN of U5s, along with lots of redundancy (power, disk, memory, buses, etc) and even geographical distribution (disaster resilience). Maybe even for cheaper.

Re:Buy the Numbers

[multipartmixed]

You also need to factor in the cost of replacing the disks in the U5s. Commodity PC disks will do.

Those piece of crap Conners (rebadged as Seagates) that they shipped with have a high failure rate when used heavily. Not to mention that they are dog slow.

I use U5s in my lab, they're cheap and binary-compatible with my production platforms. Their slowness is useful in finding bottlenecks early, however I still need to test on other platforms to identify multi-CPU issues.

Re:Buy the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

BTW: you haven't gotten debian-sparc to run on your U5s, have you? My 3.1r0a netinst ISO gets to "Starting kernel...", then the VGA goes black (but stays on). Help welcomed...

Re:Buy the Numbers

[LizardKing]

You could try NetBSD instead: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc64/ [netbsd.org]. I'd recommend NetBSD 3.0, which has just gone from a beta to a release candidate, and includes support for all of the graphics cards found in Ultra workstations. A prebuilt release candidate can be found on the FTP mirrors under /pub/NetBSD-daily/

Re:Buy the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

How good (complete) is the current NetBSD Linux binary compatibility? Because the reason for switching the U5 from Solaris to Debian is to use the same app codebase for all of my servers. I can replicate Debian directory structure with symlinks if necessary, but of course the apps need to find the Debian facilities in those directories, in addition to kernel API compatibility. Otherwise, I could just stick with (Open)Solaris.

if you run java...

[geoff lane]

...applications then even a desktop machine will benefit from multiple cores.

New Slashdot Metric

[tekrat]

So, just as how many VW Beetles can fill a Hectar, or whatever that was, now we're going to have a new slashdot metric -- i.e., how many trees your multicore CPU is worth?

Or maybe it's how many trees can fit in a Beetle.. or How many CPUs in hectar?..

Have I worn out this joke yet?

Good Chip; Bad Angle

[MidKnight]

Sun has been talking about this puppy for a while now, and it's good to seem them deliver it. It does round out their processor strategy pretty nicely: AMD on the low end, and if you want obscene performance per-CPU at the high end you get this guy. I'll be interested to see some performance numbers.

Typical Sun though: crap-tacular marketing. What's the deal with the "eco-friendly" angle? See Sun's front page [sun.com]. Which CTO's actually care about that again? It's just stupid; saving the planet is a great corporate goal, but hopefully Sun is a bit more concerned with their bottom line, where they haven't consistently made a profit in 5 years.

Re:Apple need this

[Anonymous Coward]

low power requirements != low enough for a laptop.

Niagra = 70 watts
G4 = 19 watts

Re:Except...

[Pollardito]

reminds me of this Newsweek article [msn.com] from a few months back :

That boom comes from buyers like Roberta Gray, who threw away most of her old clothes to make room for a new wardrobe from Greenloop, a boutique in Portland, Ore. A newly converted vegetarian and yogi, Gray, 43, wanted clothes that matched her healthier lifestyle. "When I buy things there, they last," she says. "They're of good quality, and I feel good about that."

it seems like her old wardrobe was lasting just fine until she threw them out!

Re:I don't know about the rest of the world

[ray-auch]

In that case the old inefficient systems would still be running, using power, hence no environmental gain.

The only way to get the claimed environmental gain would be if the old systems were never used again - which then does raise the landfill etc. issues

Re:"The Niagra chip"

[ettlz]

That's because "with this new processor Sun hopes to get a leg over on the competition" (e.g., fuck Intel?).

Re:So that's no effect at all, then

[Yartrebo]

Right on.

To be pedantic, planting trees (unless it's done on soil that was used for industrial agriculture, which has pretty much giving up its carbon already), will generally cause a release of CO2 from the ground. Even once the forest becomes mature, the net release of CO2 is positive in many cases (especially if the land used to be grassland).

But assuming that is ignored, a million trees:
  - Is nothing. Assuming they're Christmas trees, it's about a square kilometre. It's also about 1/100th of the annual harvest in the USA.
  - Is meaningless. Tell me in megatonnes of CO2 or gigawatts how much this will save, and if it doesn't equal a megatonne/yr or gigawatt, then it is just a drop in the bucket. Probably less of an effect than eradicating all spyware (thus causing less PCs to be replaced by lazy or ignorant or rich PC owners).

Re:So that's no effect at all, then

[zerocool^]

What if it conserves slightly more than a gigawatt? Say, maybe 1.21 gigawatts?

Will you travel back in time to eat your own words?!?

~W

Re:So that's no effect at all, then

[cbiltcliffe]

No, I guess [wpi.edu] they don't [wtv-zone.com], do they? [arborcentre.co.uk]

Re:It is a pretty good performer in its target are

[10Ghz]

200W for dual-core Opteron? Show me the proof of that particular claim. In reality Opterons are nowhere near 200W. the SYSTEM might consume that much, but not the CPU alone.

Re:It is a pretty good performer in its target are

[10Ghz]

well, if you could have three dual-core Opterons in a system, I would say that those Opterons would walk all over the Niagara. USPARC isn't really that great these days as far as performance is concerned, unless you compensate with lots and lots of cache. And doesn't Niagara use simplified USPARC?

The Niagara would run at around 1GHz and have 3MB of L2 cache. The Opteron-machine would run around 2GHz and have 6MB of L2. Yes Niagara has SMT but I don't think it' enough to compensate. And you can't compare clo

Re:You know the chip is a flop when...

[tomstdenis]

One phrase: 8 cores + with 16/8 K cache per core and **one** L2 cache.

I'm sorry but I'd like to think that part of the SMP boost AMDx2 delivers so smoothly is that each core has a fair chunk of cache [64/64 + 512 or 1024] with a dedicated HT bus.

So is this an 8-port L2 ? What is the latency on it when all 8 cores are busy? etc... I think we'll find this core will suffer greatly from this point.

I mean look at the Pentium D. It's only saving grace is the 1MB of L2 each core has. The interlink bus is jus

The low Sparc of high heeled boys...

[argent]

The Sparc architecture has always had a problem getting good straight-line performance, because of the way the register windows constrain the compiler by exposing a small register set to the optimiser while still having the large context switch overhead of a large register set. Sun has long used multiple register contexts and microthreading-like techniques supported by the OS to get good multitasking performance despite these shortcomings, so this is a natural extension of the Sparc family.

And, yes, I'm sur