Kernel Mustard

Sun has announced the latest rev in its Niagra line, the line of highly multi-threaded CPUs that were designed from the ground up with total chip throughput being the most important variable (followed perhaps by power consumption). It’s a really cool design, but at 64 threads per chip, there’s no chance that most current (non-server) software can effectively leverage its power.

There was a discussion on NTDEV some time ago about factoring out fine-grained locks for the sake of design simplicity. I’m a big supporter of that line of thinking, but 64-thread chips may just make that kind of optimization untenable.

Related: Ken just wrote about this issue a couple of weeks ago.

I can’t wait to see what happens in the app world. This topic has been heavily debated around Positive Networks for a couple of years, with some people asserting that most user apps just don’t need any more single-thread perf than they currently get, and others (myself included) that point out that people will find uses for the additional power, 90% of which will come from additional threads/cores/etc, rather than from improvements in straight-line per-thread perf.