Sun CIO hints at Niagara's future

Sun Microsystems plans to introduce its first servers based on the Niagara processor late this year but the company's internal IT department is already playing with future editions.

In an interview with CNET News.com, Sun's CIO William Vass detailed some of the performance improvements and energy savings that the Niagara chip affords over x86-systems.

He also said that Sun intends to substantially increase the number of cores that Niagara will have, giving companies the equivalent of 128 processors on a single chip.

"Imagine a 128-way CPU - it's pretty amazing," said Vass. "We've been playing with some early prototypes."

Sun has already started using Niagara-based servers internally and the improvements are dramatic for certain applications, Vass said. The first edition the UltraSparc architecture-based processor includes eight processing engines, or cores, each of which can handle four instruction sequences called threads.

"We're seeing incredible performance on that. It's on the order of double-digit kinds of performance you'd get on a single Intel box. Maybe you could replace 30 or 40 Intel boxes with a single chip," he said. Fewer servers lower administrative costs, Vass added.

He noted that the performance boost Niagara allows over x86 systems really only applies to "horizontal scaling" or applications where many computing threads are processed simultaneously, such as Web servers.

"If you were to race it against an Opteron box, if you were running one or two thread, you'd think it is disappointing," he said. But in a situation where there are several tasks done in parallel, "it scales out."

The difference in power consumption compared to x86 systems is dramatic, Vass said. Thirty or forty x86 servers might consume 10,000 watts while a single Niagara box will need only 50 watts, he said.

Vass added that Sun is going to be able to bring some energy-efficiency to its Galaxy line of AMD Operton servers, giving the company an edge over equivalent offerings from Hewlett Packard and IBM. "Heat and wattage are a big deal in the data center."