Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T2 microprocessor is a multithreading, multi-core CPU. It is a member of the SPARC family, and the successor to the UltraSPARC T1. The chip is sometimes referred to by its codename, Niagara 2. Sun started selling servers with the T2 processor in October 2007. New features The T2 is a commodity derivative of the UltraSPARC series of microprocessors, targeting Internet workloads in computers, storage and networking devices. The processor, manufactured in 65 nm, is available with eight CPU cores, and each core is able to handle eight threads concurrently. Thus the processor is capable of processing up to 64 concurrent threads. Other new features include: Speed bump for each thread, which increased the frequency from 1.2 GHz to 1.6 GHz One PCI Express port (x8 1.0) vs. the T1's JBus interface Two Sun Neptune 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports (embedded into the T2 processor) with packet classification and filtering L2 cache size increased to 4 MB (8-banks, 16-way associative) from 3 MB Improved thread scheduling and instruction prefetching to achieve higher single-threaded performance Two integer ALUs per core instead of one, each one being shared by a group of four threads One floating point unit per core, up from just one FPU for the entire chip Eight encryption engines, with each supporting DES, Triple DES, AES, RC4, SHA1, SHA256, MD5, RSA-2048, ECC, CRC32 Hardware random number generator Four dual-channel FBDIMM memory controllers Core pipeline There are 8 stages for integer operations, instead of 6 in the T1. Systems The T2 processor can be found in the following products from Sun and Fujitsu Computer Systems: Sun/Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers Sun Blade T6320 Server Module Sun Netra CP3260 Blade Sun Netra T5220 Rackmount Server Sun also licensed the T2 processor to Themis Computer, which introduced the first non-Sun T2-based servers in 2008: Themis T2BC Blade Server, which supports the entire family IBM BladeCenter chassis UltraSPARC T2 Plus In April 2008, Sun released servers based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor, an SMP capable version of UltraSPARC T2. Sun released the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor with the following changes: Ability to be used in 2 or 4 processor configurations (first CoolThreads processor capable of multi-processor capability) Loss of on-chip embedded 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller T2 Plus systems UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors can be found in the following products from Sun and Fujitsu Computer Systems: Two-way SMP servers: