Sun announces green chip

Sun is playing the eco card with its latest processor, flaunted as the most eco-responsible chip ever.

The UltraSPARC T1 is a little different to your average commercial CPU. Look at AMD and Intel's server chips and you'll see one or two cores, with each of those cores dealing with one or two threads simultaneously. Sun's latest chip, using CoolThreads technology, incorporates up to eight processing cores, each capable of dealing with four threads simultaneously.

So how does this make the UltraSPARC T1 eco-friendly? Well, cramming that much parallel processing power into a single processor package means that one chip can do the work of several 'lesser' chips. On paper at least, that works out well, with 32 simultaneous threads being dealt with at a cost of 72watts, "It's like a rack of servers on one chip", say Sun.

Looking at some more features of the T1, it has a 134-GB/sec crossbar switch to connect each core with the memory and I/O subsystems. The memory channels, of which there are four, can provide 25.6 GB/sec of bandwidth. 3MB of 4-bank L2 cache is shared between the cores. If things get a little toasty for the T1, it can start shutting down cores to prevent overheating, processor damage, and of course, crashes.

Back to the power consumption benefits, and there's more to the T1 than saving the environment. Sun's press release quotes Rene Wienholtz, CIO of STRATO Rechenzentrum AG:

Our energy consumption usage continues to rise, due to the internal and external growth. Internal means that the existing customers use more of their allotted resources or are upgrading to a bigger product package. The external growth is given by the number of new customers we get every month. We are spending over a million dollars per year just to keep up with the demand of the datacenter and we're running out of space. Sun's new chip will help prevent us from having to build a costly new datacenter, saving time and money.

Ah yes, money. Environment aside, if it takes up less rack space it's bound to have appeal, so Sun could well be onto a winner, providing the chip delivers as promised. The UltraSPARC T1 will be available by the end of the year, when it ships with Sun's latest SunFire servers.