Counting threads could be the new way of rating servers
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2004 12:00:00 AM MDT
When looking to purchase new servers, IT professionals may have to stop thinking so much about clock speed and start paying attention to how many threads a machine handles.
Threads are the software-based instructions that tell a central processor when and how to handle specific tasks. The major server manufacturers—Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM—are developing systems in which chips can handle multiple threads simultaneously. The idea is to boost system performance by making the machine capable of processing more instructions in a shorter period of time.
Industry analyst firm IDC, Framingham, Mass., calls this a logical approach. "Today, servers can be idle up to 75 percent of the time while processors wait for data from memory," an IDC analyst wrote in a Sun-sponsored white paper. "By focusing on increased application workload throughput instead of clock speed, [multithreading processors] could deliver significant performance increases."
Sun has been credited with pioneering this approach, and it appears to be staking its future on it. When it released its first servers containing a multithreaded chip—the UltraSPARC IV—this past spring, Sun also announced it was canceling development of two other "traditional" processors.
"The kinds of applications and workloads people are running today call for getting more compute power out of a given piece of silicon real estate," says Chris Kruell, a director in Sun's Scalable Systems Group. "UltraSPARC IV was our first multithreaded chip and we expect to see these products get bigger and better down the line."
IBM has put multithreaded chips into its recently released P5 line of servers, and says it has an advantage over Sun and HP in this area because its chips are compatible with Linux as well as the operating system for the IBM iSeries, in addition to UNIX. So far, Sun and HP multithreaded chips are only compatible with UNIX.
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