The Multicore CPU Race Is On

With x86/x64-based systems rivaling older RISC-based CPU platforms, it should come as no surprise that enterprise computing has seen some major performance boosts as well. Slightly more than a year ago, Sun started shipping systems based on its UltraSPARC T1 processor, code-named Niagara. Using a multithreading capability that Sun calls CoolThreads, the company says it can double transaction throughput while cutting power utilization in half over the prior SPARC processors.

Sun targets its SPARC processors at mission-critical, transaction-oriented applications, as well as midrange to high-end Web-tier systems. Its core customer base consists of telcos, large companies in the financial-services industry and firms running so-called Web 2.0 applications.

"The demand on infrastructure for such companies is way above Moore's Law, so the traditional sort of approach of adding more megahertz and increasing the memory size on the processors doesn't fit those applications," says Fadi Azhari, Sun's director of marketing for SPARC and chip multithreading, or CMT, technologies.

That's why Sun pursued the course of scaling its SPARC processors using multithreading capability, Azhari says. The next iteration of the T1 processor, dubbed UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2), will have the same number of cores--eight--but it will also have double the number of threads per core. As a result, T2 will offer twice the throughput in the same thermal and power envelope, according to Sun. In addition, the T2 will have one floating point unit per core, rather than one per processor. The FPU performs mathematical computations on a CPU.

Itanium, Take Two

Since its release earlier this decade, Intel's Itanium has gotten off to a slow start. But with its second generation, code-named Montesito, it seems to be gaining some momentum. Although Itanium's biggest supporter has always been HP, others that offer servers based on the platform include Bull, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, NEC, Silicon Graphics and Unisys. In 2005, the Itanium Solutions Alliance was formed to develop and promote Itanium-based solutions. Its charter members include BEA, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP and Sybase.

HP recently gave Itanium momentum by adding the DL8 60C, its first Integrity blade for the new c-Class Blade System.

"We're going after our competition with high-end capabilities at entry-level price points," says Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization and business-critical systems at HP. "Our objective is to [get] Sun market share in the entry class."

One of Itanium's benefits is its ability to run HP/UX. But Karl Freund, vice president of Systems P marketing at IBM, says much of HP's legacy customer base, including those on PA/RISC running HP/UX, is migrating to the Power platform. "Customers see Power providing the performance they want," Freund says. "Plus they've been burned by a road map that came to an end. They see Power as a viable architecture for the long term."

Sales of Power-based servers are distributed evenly among low-end, midrange and large data-center implementations. At the low end, P Series servers are attractive at branch offices in retail and banking, where reliability is critical.

IBM has offered a quad-core implementation of its Power5 processor since October 2005. IBM positions Power5 for applications that require a lot of throughput on multiple threads, such as Web-facing systems. Conversely, applications that are not highly threaded will not perform as well on a quad-core processor as they will on a processor with a higher clock speed, Freund says.

Clock speed will be the emphasis of IBM's next generation of the Power Processor. Due out later this year, Power6 will have clock speeds ranging from 3 GHz to 4 GHz, and that will optimize workload management specifically as it relates to transaction processing. It will also demonstrate a major boost in integer performance, according to Freund.

In the end, customers are likely to stick with the platform most closely aligned with their existing infrastructures. Software will almost always drive platform decisions. "The value isn't always in the architecture," says In-Stat's McGregor. "It's in the software."

NEXT: The top 5 RISC/Itanium Unix vendors.