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.
Actually the chip is named after me, not a pun on the famous drug. I’m the place where water falls and can’t get it up.
We have seen Sun’s next generation servers, targeting the xSeries platform – not impressed at all. The power consumption and noise alone would turn most data centers into larger cost centers than they already are. The only thing that is nice is the 8-lane PCI Express – we pushed it hard. If I was pushed to support xSeries sprawl in my data center – I’d stick with HP DL’s – they do they trick nicely and at a price that’s justifiable!