BIOS: Technology Means Business

Sun Microsystems has announced the availability of the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers featuring patented CoolThreads technology, the industry's first eight core, 32-thread processor that packs the performance of a rack of servers onto a single chip.

Based on the company's 9.6GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor, code named Niagara, the new server family is destined to set a new industry standard for performance, energy and space efficiency with as little as half the power and space of competing systems, claims Sun.

The new servers allow customers to take advantage of the new CoolThreads technology without having to rewrite applications. The new systems are also the first servers designed from the ground up for Internet workloads and for running current and next-generation Web, application and distributed database systems.

Sun guarantees binary compatibility on the Solaris Operating System (OS) across all supported systems including the new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology. This ensures that software written for the Solaris 10 OS will run unmodified on all supported UltraSPARC systems.

The new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems start at $2995 (£1727), priced at or below 'industry-standard' servers from IBM, HP or Dell. The Sun Fire T1000 is a 1U, 19-inch deep server designed for Web and network infrastructures. The Sun Fire T2000 is a 2U, 24.3-inch deep server with internal redundancy capabilities.

The Sun Fire T2000 ships six or eight processor cores while the Sun Fire T2000 ships with four, six or eight processor cores. Both ship with up to 32 threads - an industry first - each core is able to handle four 'threads.' The nucleus of these new systems is the UltraSPARC T1 processor. Its eight cores and massively-threaded design has been developed to compete with Intel's Xeon and IBM Power PC processors.

Sun is now offering the industry's largest 'Try and Buy' program that enables customers and ISV partners to test out a new Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 server running the highly threaded UltraSPARC T1 processor free of charge for 60 days, with the option to purchase the system. More information can be found at www.sun.com/emrkt/trycoolthreads.