Sun doubles Niagara chip speed

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 7 Aug 2007 at 12:18

Sun Microsystems has doubled the speed of the Niagara processors used in its most powerful servers.

The UltraSPARC T2 will be available later this year and for the first time Sun will sell the chip to other hardware makers.

Sun established a new business unit last March after several firms approached it about the possibility of licensing the Niagara technology.

Chief executive Jonathan Schwartz claims that it will be used in a range of devices that rely on custom chips, including networking and storage kit.

Niagara 2, as the new chip is known, is capable of executing 64 threads at the same time, Sun says, pointing out that most competing chips can manage just four.

"Sun is entering the merchant silicon business and by that we're going to be chasing the commodity volume markets which are not simply limited to the market place for server computers," says Schwartz.

The new chip will go head-to-head with IBM's latest Power6 processor, but early signs are good for Sun, with Niagara topping a number of benchmark tests. Nonetheless IBM's vice president of marketing and strategy, Scott Hand, insisted that the Sun chip will be confined to "niche markets such as web hosting".

Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood disagrees, insisting that Niagara is "just what IT managers need if they are facing the problems of increasing workloads and increasing power and limited power and cooling resources".

However he doubts whether the decision to license the chip will have an impact on high-volume markets where Intel dominates.