UltraSPARC T2 gains CGL support
Apr 16, 2008 — by Eric Brown — from the LinuxDevices Archive — 4 views
Wind River announced that it will port its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) and Workbench development suite to Sun's multicore UltraSPARC T2. Wind River Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, will be the first carrier-grade Linux implementation for Sun's chip multithreading (CMT) processors, says Wind River.
(Click for larger view of Sun's Netra CP3260 ATCA Blade Server)
Wind River CGL will first appear on Sun's Netra Carrier Grade rack servers and ATCA blade CMT systems, such as the recently announced Sun Netra CP3260 ATCA Blade Server (picture above). Both are based on the eight-core, 64-thread UltraSPARC T2, which Sun introduced last August. Wind River completed an evaluation port of its CGL stack to Sun's 64-bit multicore, multi-threaded UltraSPARC T1 in November 2006. Earlier that year, Sun released the processor design for the T1 under the GNU GPL open source license.
UltraSPARC T2 block diagram
Sun's CMT processor technology can triple performance on network-based processor designs, claims Sun, while lowering processor parts counts by a third or more and reducing power and heat emissions. The UltraSPARC T2 incorporates eight cores clocked at 900 MHz to 1.4GHz, yet requires less than 95 watts (nominal) overall, and less than two watts per thread, claims Sun. The T2 also is also said to offer integrated multithreading of 10Gb Ethernet networking, as well as integrated PCI Express I/O expansion, and floating point and cryptographic processing units.
Stated Mike Knudsen, VP of marketing for Sun's Microelectronics unit, “Sun has taken an important step today in becoming a mainstream processor vendor for the embedded market.”
Availability
Neither Wind River or Sun provided information on the availability or pricing of the UltraSPARC T2-based systems equipped with Wind River Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition.
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