Niagara II

The first Niagara revision still leads some benchmarks, despite the fact we didn´t made a speed bump since it´s introduction. Nevertheless we didn´t stand stil the last few month. Niagara II was presented at the Hot Chips conference:

Niagara 2 takes Sun even farther down the multithreading path. Each core has two sections called thread groups that can handle four threads apiece, Grohoski said. Sun's Solaris operating system makes sure the threads are evenly distributed.

and

In addition to the doubled thread ability, Niagara 2 includes 4MB of cache memory compared to 3MB for Niagara, multiple encryption engines instead of just one, a single PCI Express port, four controllers for FB-DIMM (fully buffered dual inline memory modules) memory, and dual 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports.

and

For example, each core has a mathematical engine, called a floating point unit, in Niagara 2; its predecessor had only one such unit for all eight cores to share