We are gradually learning more about Sun's Niagara processor, which is expected to be disclosed at this year's Hot Chips in August. This bad boy has 8 cores will have a scalar 6-stage pipeline from which up to 4 threads will be executed (vertically or coarse-grained).

"The fact that Niagara will have one crypto co-processor for each of its eight cores, means that it will do well when performing security processing, for example sending and receiving information using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol."

"From the details available, Niagara looks like it is being designed for Web service providers like Google Inc., said Krewell. "Google's architecture might play well with this design with lots of processors in a dense package with relatively good power efficiency per processor," he said. "

More here.