Today Sun unveiled their next generation UltraSPARC T2 processor which was designed for virtualization. This CPU has already broken two world records for single chip CPUs. I watched the web cast after work and am feeling very inspired. At the beginning of the webcast they showed two full sized server cabinets side-by-side representing relatively current high performance servers from Sun. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, held a new UltraSPARC T2 processor in his hand and told the audience that this one chip is capable of replacing both cabinets – 64 servers. The T2 is made up of eight cores, each capable of running eight simultaneous threads. That is a total of sixty four simultaneous threads running at 1.4 Ghz each, or 89.4 Ghz total. (The clock speed of SPARC processors is different than x86 processors -- 1.4 Ghz is fast.) Sun says that developers who use the Java platform already have the infrastructure to take advantage of a 64 thread system without having to learn anything new. Solaris 10 and Ubuntu Linux will be the first operating systems capable of running on the T2.

Each core has its own cryptographic acceleration unit and a total of ten independent functions including NSA-approved algorithms. Sun said that having cryptography on chip is up to 17x faster than having a dedicated hardware board for cryptography, which is already very fast. The Solaris 10 kernel currently has APIs for developers to perform cryptographic functions. The kernel has been enhanced to support the on chip cryptography which means existing applications do not have to change to take advantage of the T2's cryptographic accelerated functions.

The T2 also has dual, virtualizable, multithreaded 10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports with built-in packet classification to ensure fast access to networks and server-to-server communications.

The T2 has eight lanes of industry-standard PCI Express I/O which speeds up applications such streaming media, database read/write and data back-up. Quad memory controllers deliver more than 50 Gigabytes-per-second of memory access. If you are going to virtualize several cabinets of servers you will need a lot of memory. The T2 can handle large amounts of memory.

Sun announced that the T2 will be a general purpose commodity processor meaning that it can be used outside of Sun hardware. They are very interested in other server vendors such as HP and IBM using these processors in their servers. There are also plans to make scaled down versions of this processor for set top boxes, telecommunications and mobile devices. Imagine a cell phone with more CPU power than your current workstation! Wow. Sun says that the T2 processor will cost under $1000 US and will be available in Q4 2007! These CPUs cost less to manufacture than the competition because they didn't focus on upping the clock speed of single threaded cores past 4 Ghz, putting 24 MB of expensive cache on chip, etc. Instead, they focused on supporting more simultaneous threads which apparently keeps costs down. They also use significantly less power than the competition.

The T2's design and test suite has been made open under GPL license. Sun hopes that universities will use these desings in their engineering classes. Berkley has already made contributions back to Sun based on the specs. This is the first 64 thread general purpose commodity processor who's complete design is open source.

I would love to write an application that runs in Solaris 10 zones (virtual machines) on a 1U Sun rack server that has a T2 processor, tens of gigabytes of memory, and is attached to a 24 TB Sun storage array using ZFS. Sure it may sound expensive.. but compare that to buying cabinets full of servers. You could probably fit all of this in 5U. I wonder if businesses that have server rooms full of IBM, HP, or Dell would simply say no to us selling a product running on Sun hardware and Solaris 10? I would hope not. Even if they don't have staff that know how to use Solaris, it should not matter. Our applications should run like an appliance. Our staff could remotely accesses it (VPN, dialup, etc.) for service when necessary, like other vendors.