Wednesday February 27, 2008
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Wednesday February 27, 2008 The UltraSPARC T2 Processor and Security
A couple of weeks ago, the Sun Partner University saw 250 technical people from Sun's german partner community gathering in Fulda, Germany. Besides showing videos, talking about Sun Visualization Software, the Sun Grid Engine and Sun Studio Compilers and evangelizing Web 2.0, I had the honor of recording an interview with Alec Muffett, one of our Principal Engineers, based in the UK.
Alec came to Fulda to talk about the Sun UltraSPARC T2 (aka Niagara 2) Processor (here are some systems to try out) and Security. You can listen to the interview he gave at the current episode #11 of the HELDENFunk podcast (if you don't understand german, start listening after the 2nd minute or so). Now, he also published a video he recorded of himself while he gave his presentation. A very worthwhile and fun 16 minutes to watch!
Notice the fun and refreshing style of his presentation and slides A true master of the Zen Arts of Presentation!
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This entry was created on 2008-02-27 08:05:14.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
cryptography
niagara
niagara2
security
solaris
sparc
t1
t2
ultrasparc
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Wednesday August 08, 2007 A True Web 2.0 Chip
Yesterday was the big day in which we launched the UltraSPARC T2 chip, code-named Niagara 2.
Few people realize how significant this announcement really is. The UltraSPARC T1 chip already changed the game of providing a powerful web infrastructure: By providing 32 threads in parallel, the UltraSPARC T1 chip and the associated T2000 server can provide more than double the performance of today's regular chips, at half the power cost. Even now, 18 months after its introduction, this chip still remains ahead of the pack both in absolute web performance and in price/performance and in performance/watt.
UltraSPARC T2 is not just a better version of the T1 chip, it provides three significant improvements:
- More parallelism: Instead of 32 concurrent threads, UltraSPARC T2 delivers 64 threads running in parallel. Moore's law gives us twice as many transistors to play with every 18 weeks and the best way to leverage that is to turn them into parallelism. UltraSPARC T1 and T2 are all about maximizing the return on Moore's Law. Check out the specs.
- More networking: The UltraSPARC T2 features two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports directly on the chip. Two. Ten GigaBit. On the chip. The NIC is included, there is no bus system between the NIC and the CPU, the CPU is the NIC is the CPU. Total embedded networking. For applications that live in the network, what more can they ask for in a server?
- Built-in, free and fast encryption. In a world where the web becomes social, private data becomes more and more common, but also more and more important to secure. Making security a default feature of your web service is now available for free and it does not impact performance.
Of course, there are many more other improvements, such as 8 FP units, more memory etc., but the three points above alone make the UltraSPARC T2 the perfect chip for web 2.0 applications.
For instance, check out this analysis of the Facebook platform by Marc Andreesen. If you don't want to read it all, here's a summary: Web 2.0 means explosive growth in server capacity, for any reasonably successful application. In the case of iLike, they are growing their user base at the rate of 300k a day! This kind of growth can be fatal for your company if you don't have the infrastructure to sustain it. Well, UltraSPARC T2 is just the kind of technology that was designed to do just that: Handle many, many, many concurrent users at once as efficiently and securely as possible.
So, all you Web 2.0 startups out there, get in touch with your nearest Sun rep or Sun SE and ask them about UltraSPARC T2, or better yet, get a free 60-day trial of UltraSPARC T1, do your favourite benchmark, double that number and forget about that crypto-card to see what UltraSPARC T2 can do for you real soon now. Then, sit back, relax and keep those 300k a day users coming!
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This entry was created on 2007-08-08 09:07:37.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
adoption
facebook
grow
lokalisten
niagara
performance
scale
solaris
sparc
sun
t1
t1000
t2
t2000
ultrasparc
web
web2.0
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