Sun launches "world's fastest commodity microprocessor," at 1.4 GHz

Whee…talk about spin. Sun is basing this claim on a couple of benchmark scores, and the chip does perform well, but…well, I’m a bit too conservative I guess.

Sun logoThey are talking, of course, about the UltraSparc T2, formerly known as the Niagara II chip. The chip has 8 cores (the same as the Niagara I), but now has 8 threads per core and a floating point unit with each core (instead of 4 threads per core and 1 FPU per chip). The chip is designed to kick virtualization butt.

The DailyTech has a good, quick overview.

Interestingly, Sun is going to open source the thing

Having surpassed 5,500 downloads of the OpenSPARC T1 source code, Sun is working to release source code for the UltraSPARC T2 processor to the OpenSPARC community at www.opensparc.net.

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  2. […] latest chip – codenamed Niagara II but launched as the UltraSPARC T2 – is making its way into blades and servers available this week. The chip has 8 cores (the same as […]