Sun has formally announced its Niagara II processor line, saying that it is on track to slot the chips into its next generation of servers later this year. The boxes are likely to set a new benchmark for rivals attempting to combine performance with thrifty power consumption.

Where last year’s original Niagara release, the UltraSparc T1, offered eight cores with four threads each, the second–generation Niagara, formerly called UltraSparc T2, has eight threads on each core. It is manufactured for Sun by Texas Instruments on a 65-nanometre process that enables new on-chip capabilities such as integrated 10Gb Ethernet networking, PCI Express I/O, encryption acceleration and more advanced floating-point operations, combining to create what Sun calls a “server on a chip”.

L2 cache size has also gone up from 3MB to 4MB but clock speeds will only be in a relatively modest band between 1.2GHz and 1.4GHz as Sun shows a continued preference for increasing core and thread count rather than following the traditional means of ramping up performance.

“Java and virtual machines have disaggregated that old link between clock speed and system performance,” said Matthew Keep, product manager for Niagara servers at Sun.

“I remember when Intel was talking about 5GHz processors but now it’s talking about eight cores and 16 threads. They’re coming to the realisation that the server market is changing.”

Sun is promising double the performance-per-watt of T1 with fewer than two watts per thread. The T2 will go into new Sun Fire servers due in the October time frame, as well as being embedded into systems such as networking equipment.

“Our primary objective is to protect our installed base and recapture the web and application tier,” said Sun’s Keep.

Despite the success of Niagara, Keep insists there remains space for Sun to maintain relationships with chip suppliers AMD and Intel, as well as for dev eloping its own next-generation Rock processor aimed at high-end servers with demanding memory bandwidth needs, running tasks such as data warehousing.

Intel-based rack servers are due from Sun next month while Rock will make its bow in late 2008, according to current schedules. In between, Sun plans to early next year ship a “T2+” refresh, codenamed Victoria Falls, which will support dual-socket servers.

“The fact is that there’s a huge diversity of customers running a huge diversity of architectures,” Keep added.

Sun will offer T2 intellectual property under an open-source licence with Keep suggesting that the opening up of its processor designs is helping the company to win the support of developers and students alike.

“It enables us to start conversations with OEMs such as Simply Risc, which uses a derivative of Niagara for set-top boxes and PDAs, and lets us get students very familiar with Sparc and Solaris because these are the CIOs and developers of the future.”

Analysts were impressed by Sun’s UltraSparc T2 story.

“It’s an amazingly powerful best,” said Tony Lock, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.

“The chip is extremely sophisticated and it’s going to be very useful for customers that have multithreaded environments. Initially, it will appeal to very compute-intensive areas where there are huge volumes of work to be processed, particularly if customers are challenged for power consumption.”

Jonathan Eunice of Illuminata said, “Our era is one where apps are increasingly delivered as network services [and] what matters is how well the back-end infrastructure runs, not how popular the server brand is or has been. This is the opportunity for Sun, and for T2: one, because network delivery gives customers a lot more flexibility to swap infrastructure options in or out than they had even five years ago; two, because there's a huge build-out occurring to get the massive scale that the network-delivered applications and mega -datacenters require; and three, perhaps most important, because Niagara is really, really good at serving up networked applications.”