It may not boost the frame rate in a round of Doom 3 or put the put the glistening ooze on a monster’s skin, but the new UltraSparc T2 processor from Sun Microsystems is being boldly billed as “the world’s fastest microprocessor.” Whether or not the T2, codenamed Niagara 2, can live up to that tall claim, it is undoubtedly quick.
Sporting eight cores with eight threads each, the T2 will supposedly perform twice as fast as its predecessor, the T1, which had only four threads per core. Sun has also bumped the L2 cache from 3MB to 4MB. Following the most recent trend in chip development, clock speed will remain approximately the same at around 1.4GHz, with the additional threads relied upon to crank things up a notch.
Besides the advances in processing speed, the UltraSparc T2 will also have 10Gb Ethernet, PCI Express I/O, and encryption acceleration all on board, leading Sun to call it a “server on a chip.”
Although the processor is manufactured by Texas Instruments for use in Sun servers, Sun also has plans to sell the UltraSparc T2 to other companies as well. The processor will be formally released on Tuesday, with a 1 p.m. EST webcast from Sun to kick things off.
