Sun announces UltraSparc T1 chip

Sun Microsystems' T1 microprocessor is leaner and meaner.

15 Nov, 2005: The Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc T1 processor, just announced, uses less power than Sun's older chips and still manages to power its eight processing cores on a single piece of silicon.

Sun plans to release its new line of Sun Fire servers by 2005-end, and may help turn around the fortunes of Sun.

The Sun Fire severs whcih will use the UltraSparc T1 will run Sun Solaris.

In 2005 second quarter, Sun's server revenue declined 5.3 percent to $1.37 billion while IBM and Hewlett Packard managed to increase their sever revenues. 

Sun now hopes that the lower-prices Sun Fire servers, while offering a substantial amount of processing firepower using the T1 UltraSparc chips, will help it attain athe success of its server-market competitors. The comparable chips from IBM and Intel are the IBM Power Chip and Intel Xeon processor. 

The T1 microprocessor from Sun has eight processing cores that can each handle four instruction sequences and a total of 32, said Jonathan Schwartz of Sun. 

We will be keeping an eye on what happens in the server processor market in the first quarter of 2006 - that should give us a good indication on whether the UltraSparc T1 can turn Sun's fortunes around.