Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced the availability of the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, featuring patented CoolThreads technology, an eight core, 32-thread processor that claims to compact the performance of a rack of servers onto a single chip. Based on the 9.6 GHz UltraSPARC(R) T1 processor, code named Niagara, the new server family has achieved eight world-record benchmarks and is setting a new industry standard for performance, energy and space efficiency with as little as half the power and space of competing systems.
The new servers are supposed to allow customers to take advantage of the new CoolThreads technology without having to rewrite applications, and are designed for Internet workloads and for running current and next-generation web, application and distributed database systems.
The technology provider guarantees binary compatibility on the Solaris Operating System (OS) across all supported systems including the new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology. This ensures that software written for the Solaris 10 OS will run unmodified on all supported UltraSPARC systems.
“Sun has once again leapfrogged the competition, establishing a five year lead over any other processor architecture in the world,” boasted Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO, Sun Microsystems, Inc. “We’re delivering the world’s most energy efficient computers and proving we can connect the planet without torching it or killing off economic opportunity.”
The new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems start at $2,995 U.S. list, priced at or below “industry-standard” servers from IBM, HP or Dell. The Sun Fire T1000 is a 1U, 19-inch deep server designed for web and network infrastructures. The Sun Fire T2000 is a 2U, 24.3-inch deep server with extensive internal redundancy capabilities to offer maximum uptime for application services and web-tier consolidation projects.
The Sun Fire T2000 ships six or eight processor cores while the Sun Fire T2000 ships with four, six or eight processor cores. Both ship with up to 32 threads – an industry first – each core is able to handle four “threads.” The nucleus of these new systems is the UltraSPARC T1 processor. Its eight cores and massively-threaded design has been developed over the past three years and is significantly more advanced than competing Intel Xeon or IBM POWER processors.