UltraSPARC T2

UltraSPARC T2 Plus micrograph
General information
Launched	2007
Designed by	Sun Microsystems
Common manufacturer	Texas Instruments
Performance
Max.CPUclock rate	1.2 GHz to 1.6 GHz
Architecture and classification
Instruction set	SPARC V9
Physical specifications
Cores	4, 6, 8
Products, models, variants
Core name	S2
History
Predecessor	UltraSPARC T1
Successor	SPARC T3

Sun Microsystems'UltraSPARC T2microprocessor is amultithreading,multi-coreCPU. It is a member of theSPARC family, and the successor to theUltraSPARC T1. The chip is sometimes referred to by its codename,Niagara 2. Sun started selling servers with the T2 processor in October 2007.

The T2 is a commodity derivative of theUltraSPARC series of microprocessors, targeting Internet workloads in computers, storage and networking devices. The processor, manufactured in65 nm, is available with eight CPU cores, and each core is able to handle eightthreads concurrently. Thus the processor is capable of processing up to 64 concurrent threads. Other new features include:^[1]

• Speed bump for each thread, which increased the frequency from 1.2GHz to 1.6 GHz
• OnePCI Express port (x8 1.0) vs. the T1'sJBus interface
• TwoSun Neptune10 Gigabit Ethernet ports (embedded into the T2 processor) with packet classification and filtering
• L2 cache size increased to 4 MB (8-banks, 16-way associative) from 3 MB
• Improved thread scheduling and instruction prefetching to achieve higher single-threaded performance
• Two integerALUs per core instead of one, each one being shared by a group of four threads
• Onefloating point unit per core, up from just oneFPU for the entirechip
• Eight encryption engines, with each supportingDES,Triple DES,AES,RC4,SHA1,SHA256,MD5,RSA-2048,ECC,CRC32
• Hardware random number generator
• Four dual-channelFBDIMMmemory controllers

There are 8 stages for integer operations, instead of 6 in the T1.

Processor	Stages
T1's pipeline	Fetch	${\displaystyle ⟶}$	Thread Selection	Decode	Execute	Memory Access	${\displaystyle ⟶}$	Writeback
T2's pipeline	Fetch	Cache	Thread Selection	Decode	Execute	Memory Access	Bypass	Writeback

The T2 processor can be found in the following products from Sun andFujitsu Computer Systems:

• Sun/Fujitsu/Fujitsu SiemensSPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers
• Sun Blade T6320 Server Module
• Sun Netra CP3260 Blade
• Sun Netra T5220 Rackmount Server

Sun also licensed the T2 processor toThemis Computer, which introduced the first non-Sun T2-based servers in 2008:

• Themis T2BC Blade Server, which supports the entire familyIBM BladeCenter chassis^[2]

In April 2008, Sun released servers based on theUltraSPARC T2 Plus processor, anSMP capable version of UltraSPARC T2.^[3]

Sun released the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor with the following changes:

• Ability to be used in 2 or 4 processor configurations (first CoolThreads processor capable of multi-processor capability)
• Loss of on-chip embedded 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller

UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors can be found in the following products from Sun andFujitsu Computer Systems:Two-way SMP servers:

• Sun/Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens SPARC Enterprise T5140
• Sun/Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens SPARC Enterprise T5240

Four-way SMP server:

• Sun/Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens SPARC Enterprise T5440

TheHigh Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory in Canada built a compute cluster using 78 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers. With two 1.2 GHz T2 Plus chips in each T5140 server, the cluster has close to 10,000 compute threads, making it ideal for high-throughput workloads.^[4]

Like the T1, the T2 supports the Hyper-Privileged execution mode. The SPARC Hypervisor runs in this mode and can partition a T2 system into 64Logical Domains, and a two-way SMP T2 Plus system into 128 Logical Domains, each of which can run an independent operating system instance.

The UltraSPARC T2 offers a variety of performance improvements over the former UltraSPARC T1 processor

• Integer throughput and throughput/watt (>2x improvement)
• Integer single-thread performance (>1.4x improvement)
• Better floating-point throughput (>10x improvement)
• Better floating-point single-thread performance (>5x improvement)
• Increased performance of cryptography through additional cyphers included in the embedded crypto cores
• Two world-record single-chipSPEC CPU results, based on tests that delivered 78.5 SPECint_rate2006 and 62.3 SPECfp_rate2006

Leveraging the massive amount ofthread-level parallelism (TLP) available on the CoolThreads platform can require different application development techniques than for traditional server platforms. Using TLP in applications is key to getting good performance. Sun has published a number ofSun BluePrints to assist application programmers in developing and deploying software on T1 or T2-based CoolThreads servers. The main article,Tuning Applications on UltraSPARC T1 Chip Multithreading Systems,^[5] addresses issues for general application programmers. There is also a BluePrints article on using the Cryptographic Accelerator Units on the T1 and T2 processors.^[6]

A wide range of applications were optimized on the CoolThreads platform, including SymantecBrightmail AntiSpam,^[7] Oracle'sSiebel applications,^[8] and theSun Java System Web Proxy Server.^[9] Sun also documented its experience in moving its own online store onto a T2000 server cluster,^[10] and have published two articles on web consolidation on CoolThreads usingSolaris Containers.^[11][12]

Sun had an application performance tuning page for a range ofopen source applications, includingMySQL,PHP,gzip, andImageMagick.^[13] Proper optimization for CoolThreads systems can result in significant gains: when theSun Studio compiler is used with the recommended optimization settings, MySQL performance improves by 268% compared to using just the-O3 flag.

Other UltraSPARC T2 performance related tunings are documented on Oracle engineers' blogs.^[14]

Peak power consumption can go as high as 123watts, but the T2 typically consumes 95 watts during nominal system operation. This is up from 72 watts from the T1. Sun explains that this is due to a higher degree of system integration onto the chip.

On April 12, 2006, Sun announced thetape-out of the UltraSPARC T2.^[15]Sun announced the T2's release on 7 August 2007, billing it as "the world's fastest microprocessor".^[16]

On April 9, 2008, Sun announced the UltraSPARC T2 Plus.

On December 11, 2007, Sun made the UltraSPARC T2 processor design publicly available under theGNU General Public License via theOpenSPARC project. The release includes:

• Verilog RTL source code of the design
• Verification environment
• Diagnostics tests
• Open source tools, scripts and Sun internal tools needed to simulate the design
• ISA specification (UltraSPARC Architecture 2007)
• Solaris 10 OS simulation images

• OpenSPARC T2 and Specifications
• OpenSPARC Overview
• CMT Comes Of Age: Sun engineers give the inside scoop on the new UltraSPARC T2 systemsArchived 2013-12-13 at theWayback Machine
• CoolThreads Overview
• Niagara II: The Hydra Returns

• Sun microprocessors
• Open microprocessors
• SPARC microprocessors
• 64-bit microprocessors

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