Sun's Niagra processor, dubbed a “midrange” Xeon server killer by Sun, hasn't been heard much of it. Sun will be
releasing it soon though, so we can expect to get many more details soon. The Niagra has been designed to be low-power and performance-efficient. The one the article describes is a tad over 1GHz, and sports a very impressive 8 cores, with 4 virtual core each, enabling this unique CPU to execute 32 threads synchronously. The Niagra is based off SPARC design, and will have 64-thread versions (16 cores!) coming out soon after the initial release. The destination servers they are being designed for are going to be ones with large amounts of threads, very common among web servers and application servers. Sun hardware usually comes at a pretty high price, so the term “midrange” may be a bit of a misnomer, but Sun hardware tends to be very high quality.
