c0t0d0s0.org

You have to take the benchmarks with a grain of salt, as it´s a synthetic benchmark but the results found by Robert Milkowski are interesting: 16-core Intel System vs. Niagara-2. Some results are expected. For tasks without threads, the T2 is slower, but as soon as the thread count rises above 64, the T2 gets faster than the Xeon box.

But there is more: The CPU benchmark for 16, 32 and 64 threads on XEON have almost the same outcome (at least on the diagram). As the Xeon configuration has 16 cores this can be explained. The 128 threads benchmark is slower than the 64 one on Xeon. It looks like the massive thread switching takes it´s toll here. Albeit the T2 has 16 piplines as well, the system doesn´t saturate at 16 threads, the total time in sysbench decreases at least until 64 threads (i´m not sure about 128 threads).

The memory benchmark show a huge advantage for the T2. The Xeon system saturates at 4 GB/s, the T2 delivers up to 17 GB/s. It´s interesting, that that the Xeon benchmark drops sharply at two parallel threads to regain the 4 GB/s at 16 Threads.

The last benchmark was an thread benchmark: Starting with 32 threads, the N2 is faster than the quad xeon. It would be interesting to see the benchmark with 18 or 20 threads (thus larger than the amout of existent cores).

Robert Milkowski summarizes it quite well:

Quick conclusion is that Niagara-2 box can rival 4-CPU 4-core (16 cores in total) Intel boxes if your application can utilize all these cores. Sometimes it's much faster - especially if you need to access lots of memory.

PS: The dual- and quadsocket VF are not so far away

SearchDatacenter cites Nathan Brookwood in Sun Microsystems unveils Niagara UltraSparc T2 chip:

Nathan Brookwood, the founder and principal analyst for research firm Insight 64, a consulting firm based in Saratoga, Calif., said he's impressed with the upgrade.[..]All in all, it's a very impressive chip in terms of its absolute performance and its performance per watt."

And I´m really interested about a discussion at osnews.com. This portal was pro-Sun in the last few years.

I saw it today. With my own eyes. It really exists. Niagara 2 is real. And the system is nothing short of really f... cool ...

Bei James Dickens findet sich ein Bild eines Niagara II Prototypsystems. Aber bitte nicht die Luft anhalten. Das ist wirklich ein sehr früher Prototyp. 2 Halbjahr 2007 ist realistisch.
PS: Wer noch weiter in die Zukunft gucken mag ... die Entwicklung von Niagara 3 hat bereits begonnen.

News.com reports about the new processors in the SPARC-ecosphere:Sun, Fujitsu promise Sparc speed surge.