Sun/Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens SPARC Enterprise T5140 Sun/Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens SPARC Enterprise T5240 Four-way SMP server: Sun/Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens SPARC Enterprise T5440 Compute cluster The High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory in Canada built a compute cluster using 78 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers. With two 1.2 GHz T2 Plus chips in each T5140 server, the cluster has close to 10,000 compute threads, making it ideal for high-throughput workloads. Virtualization Like the T1, the T2 supports the Hyper-Privileged execution mode. The SPARC Hypervisor runs in this mode and can partition a T2 system into 64 Logical Domains, and a two-way SMP T2 Plus system into 128 Logical Domains, each of which can run an independent operating system instance. Performance improvement versus T1 The UltraSPARC T2 offers a variety of performance improvements over the former UltraSPARC T1 processor Integer throughput and throughput/watt (>2x improvement) Integer single-thread performance (>1.4x improvement) Better floating-point throughput (>10x improvement) Better floating-point single-thread performance (>5x improvement) Increased performance of cryptography through additional cyphers included in the embedded crypto cores Two world-record single-chip SPEC CPU results, based on tests that delivered 78.5 SPECint_rate2006 and 62.3 SPECfp_rate2006 Other UltraSPARC T2 performance related tunings are documented on Oracle engineers' blogs. Power consumption Peak power consumption can go as high as 123 watts, but the T2 typically consumes 95 watts during nominal system operation. This is up from 72 watts from the T1. Sun explains that this is due to a higher degree of system integration onto the chip. Release history On April 12, 2006, Sun announced the tape-out of the UltraSPARC T2. Sun announced the T2's release on 7 August 2007, billing it as "the world's fastest microprocessor". On April 9, 2008, Sun announced the UltraSPARC T2 Plus. Open design On December 11, 2007, Sun made the UltraSPARC T2 processor design publicly available under the GNU General Public License via the OpenSPARC project. The release includes: Verilog RTL source code of the design Verification environment Diagnostics tests Open source tools, scripts and Sun internal tools needed to simulate the design ISA specification (UltraSPARC Architecture 2007) Solaris 10 OS simulation images References External links OpenSPARC T2 and Specifications OpenSPARC Overview CMT Comes Of Age: Sun engineers give the inside scoop on the new UltraSPARC T2 systems CoolThreads Overview Niagara II: The Hydra Returns Sun microprocessors Open microprocessors SPARC microprocessors 64-bit microprocessors