What we´ve announced yesterday ...

What did we announce yesterday? In my opinion, the most important chip for Sun. It´s even more important than Rock. When you look around, the loads for single threaded performance decrease, and as the complete industry turns in the direction of “more cores” (even IBM talks about this in the Power7 timeframe). Rock will be important for the highest end. But the future of general purpose computing begins right here, right now. So, why is Niagara 2 so important. Niagara 1 had it´s weak points for general purpose computing. We decided to design a processor with such weaknesses, as we designed it with a certain workload in mind: Internet, a niche according to IBM and HP, but hey … it´s a really big niche. Niagara 2 was designed as a general purpose CPU. The problem of the single FPU? Addressed … the N2 has 8 of them? The issue of SSL-centric Crypto-circuits. Addressed … they were subsituted by full-fledged crypto accelerators. You get 64 threads, you get two 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces with chipsets specifically designed for multi core processing, as they implement the processing tasks in a similar multithreaded way. You get eight lanes of PCI Express. 2 Gigabyte/s in and 2 Gigabyte/s out. Solely for storage attach, as you have already two really big fat pipes of Ethernet directly connected to the inner crossbar of the chip. 60 GB/s worth of memory bandwith. The point of beeing only capable to run in single socket systems will be solved soon by Victoria Falls. Imagine a system of two or four this processors. Running on an operating system really capable to handle such large amounts of computing threads because four processor with 64 threads each means scheduling you processors on 256 hardware processor. Not an easy task. Now many people will say: Each thread will only run on 1.4 Gigahertz. This is half as fast as a modern x86 CPU. But is this really a factor? Maybe you can do more cycles in a second, but what´s the gain, when you wait most cycles for memory. A T1/T2 swiches simply to a non-memory starved thread. This is one the reason why a 1.4 GHz CPU can be faster than a 4.7 GHz CPU in SPECfp rate and SPECint rate . It´s like my sister and me at playing racing games on her PC. I´ve lost every time in spite of having the faster car. The problem: I´ve lost traction in every curve of the race track and had to reaccelerate while my sister was able to take the curve without no problems. And: 1.4 Ghz is just the beginning. IBM want´s to tell to plays it´s virtualisation card by saying: “But we have better virtualisation, we can do more than 64 LDOMS”. But the decision for limit was a sentient one: When ever you want to switch to a virtual machine, you have to save the actual register sets and restore the stored register contents of the next vm into the register sets. Takes a vast amount of clock cycles. Now: A 64 threads processor has 64 register sets. By limiting the number of domains to the number of threads - i hope you´ve already got the point - you get an important advantage: Switch from a VM to the next in a clock cycle. Neat, isn´t it ?At the end, it´s not important to be able to partition the cpu into smallest fragments. It´s important that the performance isn´t evaporated by the VM layer. Or didn´t you asked your self, why there´s no benchmark result for a virtualized system in the large benchmark portfolio of IBM or why the VMware licence prohibits benchmarks? LDOMs virtualisation is virtualisation done right. Now, as the N2 hasn´t the problem of the single FPU, that prevented N1 of beeing a general purpose CPU, the game changes again. 18 month after we did it with N1 the first time. With Niagara II you get a processor suitable for almost all tasks of computing. And as Jonathan said: You´ve ain´t seen nothing yet. But you see the future of computing today. And really soon in your datacenter. PS: Maybe some statements are really bold ones. But when you´ve read, what i´ve read in the past, when you know what i know, when you saw what i saw you would be so enthusiastic as well.