We can provide performance while reducing power draw

What is Suns green products strategy from the product
development/technology perspective?

Our green strategy starts from the processor design. Our Core-Multi
Threading (CMT) methodology has shown that we can provide performance while
maximizing performance/watt. Suns energy efficient UltraSPARC T2 CMT CPU has 64
threads and each thread consumes less than two watts of power. The
performance/watt leadership also allows customers to minimize on space. Lower
power actually causes CPUs to run cooler.

Sridhar Vajapey, VP, Technology, Validation and Test, Sun Microsystems

What is Suns roadmap for microprocessors/multi-core chips, as the
industry is talking of Quad core while Sun is well on its way to 8-cores?

More than well on its way. We have released both first and second generation
products, UltraSPARC T1 and T2, respectively, with 8-cores on a chip. UltraSPARC
T1 CMT CPU was released in December 2005.

Yes, Sun SPARC has been leading the way in innovations for nearly two decades
now. Our CMT strategy is yet another innovation that allows us to be able to
tightly integrate 8-cores with each core having 8-threads. Our first generation
CMT chip, UltraSPARC T1, had 8-cores and 4-threads per core (total of 32
threads).

In UltraSPARC T2, the 8-cores are connected by a high-speed crossbar capable
of 180GB/s of read and 90GB/s of write to internal memories. Further, apart from
the number of cores and threads, we have pulled in and integrated dual 10Gb
Ethernet ports. This further enhances the performance in networking.

What is the USP of Suns Throughput Computing Strategy? How is it
different from other technologies prevailing in the market?

The Web and applications are very thread-friendly. This is, therefore, more
of a throughput problem than a single-thread problem. A single-thread design
will actually have to brute-force various threads through a pipe while in a
highly threaded environment they can indeed run in parallel. This is a
difference between the two styles of implementation.

R Jai Krishna/CyberMedia News

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