Core competency: Vendors push multicore envelope

Vendors are pushing the multicore envelope, aiming to boost performance, especially for multithreaded apps.

Customer life-cycle management firm Parago was growing so fast it was running out of space in its data center.

"We were getting close to being maxed out. Maxed out on power, maxed out on heat and maxed out on pure U [rack space]," says Michael Minichino, director of infrastructure at the Dallas company. But Parago solved its problem by bringing in new multicore systems from Sun.

The Sun Fire T2000, code-named Niagara, is built on Sun's next-generation UltraSPARC T1 chip, which has eight processing cores on a single piece of silicon. The server, made generally available last December, is geared for multithreaded Web applications such as the Java-based software run at Parago.

"By consolidating on the T2000 servers, I was able to free up a tremendous amount of space that eliminated the need for me to go back to my [collocation facility] and do any sort of space or power expansion. So that's savings right there," Minichino says. "Looking at racks that are allocated for servers, I got half of that space back, and in many cases we saw significant performance improvements. One application improved by 400%."

The Niagara systems are just the latest example of the industry's move toward multicore processors as a way to ramp up computing power without getting bogged down by the heat and power issues that come with boosting processor clock speeds.

Instead of increasing gigahertz, multicore chips cram multiple processing engines on a single piece of silicon. That lets more work be done at lower clock speeds, with less heat output and lower power demands. It also means more power in fewer systems, resulting in streamlined management and reduced cabling, early adopters say.

IBM's Power processor has been dual-core since 2001, and Sun and HP introduced their first dual-core RISC processors in 2004. Intel and AMD moved industry-standard servers into the multicore arena last year, when they introduced their dual-core processors. Sun's Niagara servers take the multicore story further.

Smaller companies such as Azul Systems are designing their own multicore chips. Azul's appliances, focused on taking the compute-intensive load off application servers, are built on custom silicon, with 24 cores on a single chip. It plans to roll out a second-generation processor with 48 cores next year, just an illustration of the extent to which multicore platforms can go.

The multicore processors are multithreaded, meaning they can handle multiple application instructions at a single time, a nice platform for multithreaded applications, such as those written in Java. Analysts say most applications today are multithreaded, so users should see a significant performance boost with the new multicore servers. Some, mostly in-house applications, however, are not multithreaded, so users should look carefully at their software before moving to dual-core platforms, analysts say.

"Asking whether you should be considering dual-core chips is like asking if you should be considering higher-frequency processors," says Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata. "But one area where it will make a difference is in the short term, where you still have product lines in which single-core processors are running at somewhat higher frequency than dual-core processors."