Niagara on Anandtech

Anandtech published an interesting piece about Niagara:

Rather than focus on the absolute numbers, it is more important to note that web applications have 3 times less IPC than CPU intensive integer apps. OLTP databases (TPC-C) do even worse: the CPU sustains on average 0.2 instructions per clock pulse, or 4.5 less than SpecInt. These numbers are no different for the Opteron or Xeon. So despite Out of Order execution, nifty branch prediction schemes and big caches, commercial server loads utilize a very meagre 10 to 15% of the potential of modern CPUs.

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Based on the technology in the current T1, SUN seems to be on schedule, and they are creating some very compelling designs. There are certainly many ways to tackle computing problems, and it's good to see some new approaches other than the standard "more cache" and "higher clock speeds" that are so common.