Sun looks set to prepare mass production of the next-generation UltraSparc T2 CPU. This CPU (code-named Niagara-II) can process up to 64 threads simultaneously, and had its first production run in March. Few bugs were visible at that time. No details on a commercial launch date are available, but the smart money is on sometime in 2007.
According to Sun, the T2 will be capable of running 64 threads, twice as much as in the T1. This may be an indication that Sun is simply doubling the amount of cores from four to eight to achieve higher parallelism. Each core will run eight threads.