Feature Story

Beat the clock.

Sun is delivering on its Throughput Computing strategy with a new breed of UltraSPARC processors.

11.Nov.03--The computer industry has always had a fixation with megahertz. CPU cycle times. Clock speed. Sun's UltraSPARC processor engineering team has been obsessed with something entirely different: maximizing the throughput of real-world applications and workloads.

What's the difference? Put it this way--it doesn't do you much good to have the world's fastest car on a jammed freeway. With traditional processor technology, blazing-fast microprocessors are held back by memory bottlenecks. But with chip multithreading (CMT), the revolutionary technology behind Sun's Throughput Computing strategy, it's like having more lanes open on the freeway. Throughput is higher. Work gets done faster. Utilization rates increase. Fewer systems are required to handle the same workload, so acquisition, administrative, and operational costs come down. In short, your company is able to focus on competing, not computing.

Workloads have changed. Why haven't processors?

More than three decades ago, Moore's Law pronounced that transistor density--and by extrapolation processor speeds--will double about every two years. Since then, processor makers have been competing in the megahertz race, exploiting Moore's Law to deliver processors with ever-faster clock speeds. But here's the problem: actual system performance gains have been much lower due to significantly slower increases in memory speeds. In fact, memory speeds have only been doubling every six years. That gap between processor and memory speeds leaves superfast processors spending as much as 75 percent of the time twiddling their silicon thumbs. Hurry up and wait.

At the same time, network computing has radically changed the nature of compute workloads. Almost everything is connected to the Internet today, and network-based applications such as online transaction processing, videoconferencing, decision support, Enterprise Resource Planning, and Web services make up the vast majority of data center workloads. These applications depend far less on the execution of a single thread (a set of software instructions that can execute independently) than on overall throughput. They are well suited to multithreaded environments. So Sun engineers posed a provocative question: why not design multithreaded processors?

Chip Multithreading: the Wait Is Over

Sun's Throughput Computing vision, announced in the spring of 2003, is built around the CMT technology developed by Sun's team of 1600 engineers--the second largest microprocessor design engineering team in the world. Here's how it works. Instead of being tuned to execute a single thread as quickly as possible, Sun's CMT processors execute tens of threads simultaneously. When a given thread must wait for memory, a CMT processor simply starts processing another thread, as shown below.

Bringing Vision to Market

CMT processors are not just on the drawing boards, they're nearing commercial production. New Sun systems featuring CMT technology are slated for shipment in 2004.

The first generation of CMT processors, the UltraSPARC IV series (Gen 1), is a dual-thread processor, initially delivering up to two times and later up to three to four times the throughput of the current data-facing UltraSPARC III processor.

Later in 2004, you can expect the debut of "Gemini," a low-power, two-thread processor that fits into a blade form factor, providing up to three times the performance of the current network-facing UltraSPARC IIi 650MHz processor.

Coming in 2005/2006 is a radical second-generation (Gen 2) CMT design called Niagara. This processor targets Web, application serving, simple databases, and is expected to increase throughput by 15 times compared to the current UltraSPARC IIi 650MHz processor. Beyond that, Sun is committed to building a system processor (Gen 3) that will deliver 30 times more throughput than the current UltraSPARC III processor.

The Power of Partnership

Complementing Sun's core competency in designing 64-bit microprocessors is the manufacturing prowess of Sun's strategic partner Texas Instruments (TI). For more than 15 years, Sun and TI have held a cooperative development agreement that has evolved into one of the industry's most successful, mutually beneficial, and longest lasting technology partnerships. Today, TI is enabling the radical processor designs that underpin Sun's Throughput Computing vision.

The "fabless" model in which TI manufactures Sun-designed processors enables Sun to focus on design without having to take on the heavy financial burden of building and maintaining a fabrication plant. In turn, TI is able to leverage Sun's experience and knowledge in its core product development efforts, including high-speed I/O ASICs, digital signal processors (DSPs), and DSP-based product lines.

With TI's technological advancements in areas such as 300-mm wafers, 90- and 65-nm technologies, low-k dielectric insulator layers, and strained silicon, the 15-year old Sun/TI relationship is striving on the vision of Throughput Computing.

Why Sun?

Since Sun's announcement of its Throughput Computing vision earlier this year, analysts have lauded Sun's processor strategy.

"By focusing on increased application workload throughput instead of clock frequency, Sun's CMT processors should deliver significant increases in application performance," said Vernon Turner, group vice president, Global Enterprise Server Solutions at International Data Corporation.

"It's a different direction," said Nathan Brookwood, a computer industry analyst at Insight 64, a market research firm. "Everyone else is saying the world is flat and Sun is saying, 'no, it's round.'"

Throughput Computing is not just about CMT processors-it involves every component of the system architecture that impacts throughput. With its many years of experience in all areas of network computing, Sun is uniquely qualified to lead CMT innovation. For example:

• Sun's multithreaded SMP systems are already providing solutions for today's thread-rich network computing environments. This means Sun's model will enable customers to transition to CMT-processor-based systems without recompiling or rewriting their current software.
  
  
• Sun's UltraSPARC processors provide 64-bit memory addressing, overcoming the bottleneck of competing 32-bit solutions. Only 64-bit architectures such as the UltraSPARC processor can fully realize the potential of Throughput Computing.
  
  
• Sun's Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) was designed to handle and schedule multiple threads. Bar none, the Solaris OS has the best threading model in the commercial operating system market today.
  
  
• In Sun's processors strategy, CMT is built in, not bolted on. Retrofitting CMT technology into an existing design focused on single-thread performance will yield a suboptimal solution.

And we're not stopping at that. In addition to processor design, Sun also continues to pursue exciting new lab breakthroughs such as proximity communication, which holds considerable promise for reducing latency and increasing bandwidth in the memory interconnect, and asynchronous circuit design.

The net result for your business is more work done in less time. And that translates into two key benefits: lower total cost of ownership, because our CMT processors will help you free up resources, and sustainable business advantages through the strategic delivery of new network services. Simply put, you'll be free to focus on your business strategy rather than your IT budget. Imagine the possibilities.

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