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UltraSPARC T1
Central processing unit

Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core)
Produced: 2005 -
Max CPU clock: 1. 0 GHz to 1. The hertz (symbol Hz) is a measure of Frequency, informally defined as the number of events occurring per Second. 4 GHz
Instruction set: SPARC V9
Cores: 4, 6 or 8

Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor, known until its 14 November 2005 announcement by its development codename "Niagara", is a multithreading, multicore CPU. The hertz (symbol Hz) is a measure of Frequency, informally defined as the number of events occurring per Second. An instruction set is a list of all the instructions and all their variations that a processor can execute A multi-core processor (or chip-level multiprocessor, CMP) combines two or more independent cores into a single package composed of a single Integrated Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a Central processing unit (CPU on a single Integrated Events 1533 - Conquistadors from Spain under the leadership of Francisco Pizarro arrive in Cajamarca, Inca Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. A code name or cryptonym is a word or name used clandestinely to refer to another name or word Multithreading computers have hardware support to efficiently execute multiple threads. Designed to lower the energy consumption of server computers, the CPU typically uses 72 W of power at 1. A server is a Computer dedicated to providing one or more services over a computer network typically through a request-response routine The watt (symbol W) is the SI derived unit of power, equal to one Joule of energy per Second. 4 GHz.

The T1 is a new-from-the-ground-up SPARC microprocessor implementation that conforms to the UltraSPARC Architecture 2005 specification and executes the full SPARC V9 instruction set. SPARC (from Scalable Processor Architecture is a RISC Microprocessor Instruction set architecture originally An instruction set is a list of all the instructions and all their variations that a processor can execute Sun has produced two previous multicore processors (UltraSPARC IV and IV+), but UltraSPARC T1 is its first microprocessor that is both multicore and multithreaded. The UltraSPARC IV and follow-up UltraSPARC IV+ are Microprocessors designed by Sun Microsystems and manufacturered by Texas Instruments. The processor is available with four, six or eight CPU cores, each core able to handle four threads concurrently. A thread in Computer science is short for a thread of execution. Thus the processor is capable of processing up to 32 threads concurrently.

Similar to how high-end Sun SMP systems work, the UltraSPARC T1 can be partitioned. In Computing, symmetric multiprocessing or SMP involves a Multiprocessor computer-architecture where two or more identical processors can connect to a single Thus, several cores can be partitioned for running a single or group of processes and/or threads, whilst the other cores deal with the rest of the processes on the system.

Contents

Cores

Pipeline UltraSPARC T1
Pipeline UltraSPARC T1

The UltraSPARC T1 was designed from scratch as a multi-threaded, special-purpose processor, and thus introduces a whole new architecture for obtaining high performance. Rather than try to make each core as intelligent and optimized as they can, Sun's goal was to run as many concurrent threads as possible, and maximize utilization of each core's pipeline.

The T1's cores are less complex than those of current high end processors in order to allow 8 cores to fit on the same die. The cores do not feature out-of-order execution, or a sizable amount of cache. In Computer engineering, out-of-order execution, OoOE, is a paradigm used in most high-performance Microprocessors to make use of cycles that Single-thread processors depend heavily on large caches for their performance because cache misses result in a wait while the data is fetched from main memory. By making the cache larger the probability of a cache miss is reduced, but the impact of a miss is still the same.

The T1 cores largely side-step the issue of cache misses by multithreading. Each core is a barrel processor, meaning it switches between available threads each cycle. A barrel processor is a CPU that switches between threads of execution on every cycle. When a long-latency event, such as cache miss occurs, the thread is taken out of rotation while the data is fetched into cache in the background. Once the long-latency event completes, the thread is made available for execution again. Sharing of the pipeline by multiple threads may make each thread slower, but the overall throughput (and utilization) of each core is much higher. It also means that the impact of cache misses is greatly reduced, and the T1 can maintain high throughput with a smaller amount of cache. The cache no longer needs to be large enough to hold all or most of the "working set", just the recent cache misses of each thread.

Benchmarks demonstrate this approach has worked very well on commercial (integer), multithreaded workloads such as Java application servers, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application servers, email (such as Lotus Domino) servers, and web servers. Enterprise resource planning ( ERP) is the planning of how business resources (materials employees customers etc Lotus Domino is an IBM server product that provides enterprise-grade e-mail collaboration capabilities and custom application platform These benchmarks suggest each core in the UltraSPARC T1 is more powerful than the circa 2001, single-core, single-threaded UltraSPARC III, and at a chip to chip comparison, significantly outperforms other processors on multithreaded integer workloads.

At the time of its release in December of 2005, a single chip, eight core, 32-thread, 1. 2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 server performed similarly to a two-socket, four-core, eight-thread, 1. 9 GHz IBM POWER5 server, performed similarly to a four socket, eight-core, sixteen-thread 3. 0 GHz Intel Xeon "Paxville MP" server, and exceeded the performance of a four socket, four-core, four-thread 1. 6 GHz Intel Itanium server. Arguably, this made the UltraSPARC T1 the world's most powerful general-purpose commercial server processors, when considering multithreaded commercial workloads.

Systems

The T1 processor can be found in the following products from Sun and Fujitsu Computer Systems:

Target market

The UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor is unique in its strength and weaknesses, and as such is targeted at specific markets. is a Japanese company specializing in Semiconductors Computers ( Supercomputers Personal computers, servers, Telecommunications The SPARC Enterprise series is a range of UNIX Server computers co-developed by Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu introduced in 2007 The Sun Fire server brand is a series of server computers introduced by Sun Microsystems in 2001 Rather than being used for high-end number-crunching and ultra-high performance applications, the chip is targeted at network-facing high-demand servers, such as high-traffic web servers, and mid-tier Java, ERP, and CRM application servers, which often utilize a large number of separate threads. A supercomputer is a Computer that is at the frontline of processing capacity particularly speed of calculation (at the time of its introduction The term web server can mean one of two things A Computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from web clients which are One of the limitations of the T1 design is that a single floating point unit (FPU) is shared between all 8 cores, making the T1 unsuitable for applications performing a lot of floating point mathematics. A floating point unit (FPU is a part of a Computer system specially designed to carry out operations on Floating point numbers However, since the processor's intended markets do not typically make much use of floating-point operations, Sun does not expect this to be a problem. Sun provides a tool for analysing an application's level of parallelism and use of floating point instructions to determine if it is suitable for use on a T1 or T2 platform. Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many instructions are carried out simultaneously operating on the principle that large problems can often [1]

In addition to web and application tier processing, the UltraSPARC T1 may be well suited for smaller database applications which have a large user count. One customer has published results showing that a MySQL application running on an UltraSPARC T1 server ran 13. MySQL is a Relational database management system (RDBMS which has more than 11 million installations 5 times faster than on an AMD Opteron server. [2]

Virtualization

T1 is the first SPARC processor that supports the Hyper-Privileged execution mode. The SPARC Hypervisor runs in this mode, and it can partition a T1 system into 32 Logical Domains, each of which can run an operating system instance. Logical Domains ( LDoms or LDOM) is a technology from Sun Microsystems which offers a virtualized computing environment abstracted from all physical

Currently, Solaris and Linux are supported, and FreeBSD support is under development. Solaris is a Unix -based Operating system introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1992 as the successor to SunOS. Linux (commonly pronounced ˈlɪnəks FreeBSD is a Unix-like free Operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD branch through [3]

Software licensing issues

Traditionally, commercial software suites like Oracle database charge their customers based on the number of processors the software runs on. Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle RDBMS or simply Oracle) is a Relational database management system (RDBMS produced and marketed by In early 2006, Oracle changed the licensing model by introducing the processor factor. Oracle Corporation ( specializes in developing and marketing Enterprise software products — particularly Database management systems In 2007 Oracle ranked With a processor factor of . 25 for the T1, an 8-core T2000 requires only a 2-CPU license. [4]

In Q3 2006, IBM introduced the concept of Value Unit (VU) pricing. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology Each core of the T1 is 30 PVUs instead of the default value of 100 PVUs per core. [5]

Weaknesses

The T1 is only available in uniprocessor systems, limiting vertical scalability in large enterprise environments; Sun has announced that the follow-on "Victoria Falls" processor will address this. [6]

Application tuning

Leveraging the massive amount of thread-level parallelism (TLP) available on the CoolThreads platform can require different application development techniques than for traditional server platforms. Utilizing TLP in applications is key to getting good performance. Sun has published a number of Sun BluePrints to assist application programmers in developing and deploying software on T1 or T2-based CoolThreads servers. The main article, Tuning Applications on UltraSPARC T1 Chip Multithreading Systems,[7] addresses issues for general application programmers. There is also a BluePrints article on using the Cryptographic Accelerator Units on the T1 and T2 processors. [8]

Case studies

A wide range of applications were optimized on the CoolThreads platform, including Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam,[9] Oracle's Siebel applications,[10] and the Sun Java System Web Proxy Server. Symantec Corporation, founded in 1982 is an International Corporation which sells Computer Software, particularly in the realms of security Siebel Systems Inc was a software company principally engaged in the design development marketing and support of CRM applications Sun Java System Web Proxy Server is a freely available HTTP 1 [11] Sun also documented its experience in moving its own online store onto a T2000 server cluster,[12] and have published two articles on web consolidation on CoolThreads using Solaris Containers. Solaris Containers (including Solaris Zones) is an implementation of Operating system-level virtualization technology first made available in 2005 as part of [13][14]

Sun has an application performance tuning page for a range of open source applications, including MySQL, PHP, gzip, and ImageMagick. Open source is a development methodology which offers practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge MySQL is a Relational database management system (RDBMS which has more than 11 million installations PHP is a computer Scripting language. Originally designed for producing Dynamic web pages it has evolved to include a Command line interface capability gzip is a Software application used for File compression. gzip is short for GNU zip; the program is a Free software replacement for the ImageMagick is a free Software suite for Image manipulation and display supporting close to 100 image formats [15] Proper optimization for CoolThreads systems can result in significant gains: when the Sun Studio compiler is used with the recommended optimization settings, MySQL performance improves by 268% compared to using just the -O3 flag. The Sun Studio compiler suite is Sun Microsystems ' flagship software development product for Solaris and Linux.

"Rock"

Main article: Rock processor

The UltraSPARC T1 is designed for single CPU systems only and is not capable of SMP. Future Sun CMT UltraSPARC processors such as Rock will support multiple chip server architectures. Simultaneous multithreading, often abbreviated as SMT, is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of Superscalar CPUs with Hardware The Rock processor targets traditional data facing workloads such as databases. As such, it is seen as the logical follow-on to Sun's SMP processors such as UltraSPARC IV, rather than a replacement for the UltraSPARC T1 or T2. The UltraSPARC IV and follow-up UltraSPARC IV+ are Microprocessors designed by Sun Microsystems and manufacturered by Texas Instruments.

Rock also targets floating point workloads, unlike UltraSPARC T1. Sun has publicly disclosed a feature in the Rock processor called hardware scout, which uses multithreaded hardware to perform prefetching. Hardware scout is a technique that uses otherwise idle processor execution resources to perform prefetching during cache misses In Computer architecture, instruction prefetch is a technique used in Microprocessors to speed up the execution of a program by reducing Wait states

Rock is the world's first general purpose processor with hardware transactional memory. Transactional memory attempts to simplify parallel programming by allowing a group of load and store instructions to execute in an atomic way

UltraSPARC T2

Main article: UltraSPARC T2

Formerly known by the codename Niagara 2, the follow-on to the UltraSPARC T1 supports eight threads per core, and each core has its own FPU. Sun Microsystems ' UltraSPARC T2 Microprocessor is a multithreading, multi-core CPU.

UltraSPARC T2 Plus

In February 2007, Sun announced at its annual analyst summit that its third-generation simultaneous multithreading design, code-named Victoria Falls, was taped out in October 2006. Simultaneous multithreading, often abbreviated as SMT, is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of Superscalar CPUs with Hardware In Electronics design, tape-out or tapeout is the final stage of the Design cycle of Integrated circuits or Printed circuit boards A two-socket server (2 RU) will have 128 threads, 16 cores, and a 65× performance improvement over UltraSPARC III. A rack unit or U (less commonly RU) is a unit of measure used to describe the Height of equipment intended for mounting in a 19-inch rack [6]

At the Hot Chips 19 conference, Sun announced that Victoria Falls will be in 2-way and 4-way servers. Hot Chips is an IEEE sponsored technological Symposium which is held every year in August on Stanford University campus since 1989 Thus, a single 4-way SMP server will support 256 concurrent hardware threads. [16]

In April 2008, Sun released 2-way UltraSPARC T2 Plus servers, the SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240.

Niagara 3

In October 2006, Sun disclosed that Niagara 3 will be built with a 45 nm process. The number of threads, cores, and the memory bandwidth also will be increased.

Open design

On March 21, 2006, Sun made the UltraSPARC T1 processor design available under the GNU General Public License via the OpenSPARC project. OpenSPARC is an Open source hardware project started in December 2005 The published information includes:

References

  1. ^ cooltst: Cool Threads Selection Tool. Workload Characterization blog. Sun Microsystems (April 6, 2006). Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services Events 46 BC - Julius Caesar defeats Caecilius Metellus Scipio and Marcus Porcius Cato in the Battle of Thapsus Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. Retrieved on 2008-05-30. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 1416 - The Council of Constance, called by the Emperor Sigismund a supporter of Antipope John XXIII burns Jerome of Prague following
  2. ^ Thomas Rampelberg; Jason J. W. Williams (2006-05-09). Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. Events 1457 BC - Battle of Megiddo (15th century BC between Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Cruisin' with a T2k (PDF) p. 6. DigiTar. Retrieved on 2007-02-07. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 457 - Leo I becomes emperor of the Byzantine Empire. 1074 - Battle of Montesarchio in which the Prince
  3. ^ FreeBSD/sun4v Project. Retrieved on 2007-04-09. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 193 - Septimius Severus is proclaimed Roman Emperor by the army in Illyricum (in the Balkans)
  4. ^ Multi-core Processors: Impact On Oracle Processor Licensing. Oracle. Retrieved on 2007-08-12. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1099 - First Crusade: Battle of Ascalon - Crusaders under the command of Godfrey of Bouillon defeat Fatimid
  5. ^ Processor Value Unit Licensing for Distributed SW. IBM. Retrieved on 2007-08-11. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 2492 BC - Traditional date of the defeat of Bel by Hayk, progenitor and founder of the Armenian nation
  6. ^ a b Fowler, John (February 6, 2007). Events 46 BC - Julius Caesar defeats the combined army of Pompeian followers and Numidians under Metellus Scipio Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Growth by Design (PDF) p. 21. Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services Retrieved on 2007-02-07. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 457 - Leo I becomes emperor of the Byzantine Empire. 1074 - Battle of Montesarchio in which the Prince
  7. ^ Developing and Tuning Applications on UltraSPARC T1 Chip Multithreading Systems. Sun BluePrints Online. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  8. ^ Using the Cryptographic Accelerators in the UltraSPARC T1 and T2 Processors. Sun BluePrints Online. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  9. ^ Tuning Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam on UltraSPARC T1 and T2 Processor-Powered Servers. Sun BluePrints Online. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  10. ^ Optimizing Oracle's Siebel Applications on Sun Fire Servers with CoolThreads Technology. Sun BluePrints Online. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  11. ^ Sun's High-Performance and Reliable Web Proxy Solution. Sun BluePrints Online. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  12. ^ Consolidating the Sun Store onto Sun Fire T2000 Servers. Sun BluePrints Online. Sun Microsystems (October 2007). Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  13. ^ Deploying Sun Java Enterprise System 2005-Q4 on the Sun Fire T2000 Server Using Solaris Containers. Sun BluePrints Online. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  14. ^ Web Consolidation on the Sun Fire T1000 using Solaris Containers. Sun BluePrints Online. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  15. ^ Application Performance Tuning. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved on 2008-01-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 475 - Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople.
  16. ^ Stephen, Phillips (August 21, 2007). Events 1192 - Minamoto Yoritomo becomes Seii Tai Shōgun and the De facto ruler of Japan. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Victoria Falls: Scaling Highly-Threaded Processor Cores (PDF) p. 24. Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services Retrieved on 2007-08-24. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 49 BC - Julius Caesar 's General Gaius Scribonius Curio is defeated in the Second Battle of the Bagradas River

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