Sun's UltraSparc CPU

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satimis

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May 9, 2005
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Hi folks,


Any info about Sun's UltraSparc CUP?

Several months ago Sun announced to sell UltraSparc as component to the market early 2008. Afterwards not much info in this respect was found.

Any info/comment

TIA


B.R. and Happy New Year
satimis
 
SPARC chips are for UNIX servers - Nearly always running Sun Solaris, though other flavors of UNIX/LINUX are supported as well. I know there was an effort (5 years ago!?!?) to port NT over to a SPARC chip, but apparently that went nowehere. I'm not sure if SPARC chips even support "X" instructions (as in x86 and X64), as my vague understanding is that SPARC is a standard in and of itself and not related to desktop stuff at all.

So if this question is in regards to a consumer/windows/PC to use a SPARC chip to play games and whatnot... Or whether Scott McNealy over at Sun Microsystems wants to take the "competitor to Intel" slot currently occupied by the beaten and battered AMD... Well.... *NOT* going to happen.
 
HI Scotteq,


Thanks for your URL.


UltraSparc is considered as the fastest CPU with 8 cores, mainly for server (Of course it can be used as workstation if cost is NOT a matter). The last information I have was about 6 months ago Sun announced to produce 1st lot of 10k chips in the last quarter of 2007. The chips will be marketed on the 1st quarter of 2008. From that announcement onward no further information has been heard. Some Linux distro and Unix have Sparc version. I don't worry unable getting an OS running on it. What I hesitate is the mobo matching the chip. Nowadays it is possible to find UltraSparc chip on the market but not many. The next move of UltraSparc will be 16 cores.

There will be a new era on server. Users can build their own server running on 8/16 core CPU.


satimis


 
Ah... This is pretty much a consumer/desktop site, so the majority of us don't deal with server side gear/operating systems. There's a couple people here with that kind of background, but by and large it's not going to be good place to find the info you're looking for.

I replied just because I figured maybe someone read an article saying "eight cores" and blew a gasket wondering when he'd be able to put one into his Intel 975~based mobo and get Crysis running at 150 frames per second....
 


NT used to run on MIPS and Alpha, I'm not sure whether it was ever ported to SPARC, but I don't think it was. There was an x86 emulator for running x86 code slowly; OK for normal desktop apps that spent most of the time idle (and much of the rest in the operating system, which ran native), but not for CPU-intensive apps.

SPARC is an interesting CPU design, but some of the interesting ideas (like register windows) didn't really provide as much benefit as some expected.
 


Ah, I remember Intergraph; the company I worked for did some software for their Clipper chip years ago, which was really bizarre. I worked with some of the people who did the x86 emulation for NT on Alpha and MIPS, and I hadn't remembered them doing a SPARC version.

After the years I spent programming on SPARCstations I am tempted to buy an old one off ebay sometime :).
 


.....and wear the same clothes for a week..... and spend your nights sleeping under your desk for weeks at a time....



I had a Marketing/Sales hat on when I was in Software. I seriously felt sorry for the programmers: We bought memberships to the gym down the street for them all so they'd have a place to shower. And I kid you not.
 


LOL... we had a shower in the building, and 24 hour security so people could come and go whenever they wanted. I think I only slept on the sofa in the office two nights in five years, because I was too drunk to drive home (aside from evening pub trips, the company gave out free beer on Friday afternoons) :). And fortunately my little two-seat Fiat was so low that I could drive under the barrier at the entrance without having to wake up the security guard at night.

There were a lot of interesting stories out of that company, but I'd better not mention any of them in case anyone figures out who they are :).
 


There are two UltraSPARC T series CPUs: the T1 and the T2. The T1 was the first in the series and is a 90 nm 4, 6, or 8-core chip that can process up to two threads per core (similar to how a single-core Pentium 4 HT can process two threads per core.) The T1 ran at 1.0-1.2 GHz and has 3 MB L2 cache. It is primarily designed for web servers (especially ones that run lots of JVMs- big surprise there, huh!). The T2 also has up to 8 cores but each core can juggle 8 threads instead of two, so the OS sees 64 logical processors. The T2 has 4 MB L2 and is built on a newer 65 nm process and goes up to 1.4 GHz. Both the T1 and T2 are available only in single-CPU Sun servers and are notable for their low (~70-watt) thermal dissipations.

You can use either the T1 or T2 as a general-purpose CPU if you have an OS that runs on a SPARC64 CPU (Solaris, Linux, probably some BSDs as well). The CPU is heavily biased towards throughput in very multithreaded tasks, which is pretty much the opposite of what most desktop users encounter. The T1 also absolutely sucks at floating-point computation as it has one FPU for the entire CPU. The T2 improves FP performance as it has one FPU per core instead of one FPU per CPU, but it still significantly trails a Core 2 or K8/10h based system in FPU power as Core 2s and K8s/10hs have three FPUs per core and run at 2-3x the clock speed.
 

Thanks for your detail advice.

IIRC Sun is prepared to market T2 Sparc chip to the market as component.

Actually the technology running Sparc is quite mature on Open Source. There are;

Ubuntu Server edition
Sun UltraSPARC based

Debian sparc version

OpenSolaris sparc verion

FreeBSD sparc64

OpenBSD sparc64

etc.


It is possible to build OS on the chip. I'm waiting to see a new era on server.


B.R.
satimis
 
We all live in America, Coca-cola, UltraSparc...
No, really, from your dialect you seem foreign.
This *really* OldSchool sysadmin i know says that the only thing that will run worth a damn on ultrasparcs is solaris, and only if you've got a hell of a lot of processors.
 
I see this thread is almost a year old so I'll keep it brief, you can pick up Ultra Sparcs for next to nothing on eBay, but *no* the chips are not compatible with being stuffed into a pentium motherboard. The architechture is totally differant, as someone pointed out big endian is usually just Server side machines. If your looking to stuff something onto a Sun SPARC its worth checking out Linux as you can get updated copies of Linux for nothing and usually you just need a 64bit release. Certainly *not* a hell of a lot of processors as surrealdeal says, just a processor capable of pumping away at 450mhz or more. I picked up a 800Mhz Cheetah SPARC for $100.00 and have since given it a new lease of life by stuffing it into a bright red ferrari case, it sit's next to my pentium 4 machine running OpenBSD quite nicely. Both boxes run some flavor of Linux and as to sticking Windows on one of them, well I have Windows 7 but it just doesnt appeal to me.
 
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