Niagara 2

I was at the launch of Sun Microsystems’ new Niagara 2 (a.k.a. UltraSPARC T2) processor today. Full disclosure: I work at Sun and I’m biased, but I think we have a real breakthrough product. 64 threads packed into 8 cores. A screamer.

Above is a photo of the N2 die.

So what is a processor thread? My favorite metaphor: picture yourself waiting in line at the airport. The line is long. The teller is slow. There are two ways you can make the line move faster: increase the speed that the teller works or add more tellers.

Historically, processor designers have focused on making the processor (or the “teller”) work faster. Sun changed that and instead added more processing units, “threads,” within each processor. The result: the world’s fastest processor. And energy efficient to boot.

And with Niagara 2 we’re hopeful that Sun is breaking into the commodity processor market.