Posted on Saturday, August 04 2007 @ 9:46 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Sun will soon release its eight-core, 64-thread Niagara 2 processor. Information Week
reports:
Possibly you haven't heard too much about the chip, which is officially called the UltraSparc T2, because Sun doesn't sell processors to OEMs and retail users, the way Intel and AMD do.
Also, Sun has a decidedly abstruse way of marketing its chips. Rather then emphasizing that Niagara 2 is equipped with eight processors, each of which handle eight threads, Sun is instead positioning the device as the centerpiece of its "Throughput Computing" effort. That's a catch phrase only a company of Sun's ilk--cool in a rather unhip way--could love.
What does it mean? Umm, this:
Throughput Computing is the underlying strategy of Sun's new family of UltraSparc processors designed to significantly increase real-world application performance while helping to cut the cost and complexity of network computing. These processors maximize throughput [via] chip multithreading. CMT integrates the power of symmetric multiprocessing onto a single chip, allowing a single processor to execute several software threads simultaneously.
