The Hot Chips 21 Conference held August 23rd-25th at Stanford University had Sun chip designers discussing the company's next-generation multithreaded UltraSPARC T2 processor, codenamed "Rainbow Falls," and a security coprocessor that they say will reduce encryption costs for applications such as VoIP calls and online banking web sites.

Rainbow Falls will feature 16 cores, each with its own L2 cache and four "coherence units". These units will have two interfacing independently to three high-speed links for remote node connectivity. Each coherence unit "supports requests to a memory address whether homed local or remote, and maintains coherence across (the) SMP cluster," according to Sun. A "coherency plane," meanwhile, is a partition of the physical address along with the associated resources.

Bottom line, the coherency units will help keep track of all the memory contents and what is where in a dense cluster of systems, reported internetnews.com's Andy Patrizio. Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, told internetnews that at eight or 16 cores, the issue of coherency becomes paramount because so many caches have to keep their data current. When one process core alters some data, all the other processors have to be told their cache data is old and get the new data.

Sun will be adding a core to L2 Bank Crossbar (CCX), where two cores share a common port into a CCX, and the CCX connects all 16 L2 caches. This will help prevent L2 cache misses and optimize layout, the company said.

The security coprocessor will be included on the same silicon as Rainbow Falls, said Sun engineer Lawrence Spracklen as reported IDG News Service James Niccolai. Although this is not the norm, Spracklen said for applications that require data to be encrypted in small packets, such as VoIP calls and programs that use IPsec, it's impractical to offload the work to an external chip because there is too much latency moving the data back and forth to the CPU. Moving the coprocessor onto the same silicon as Rainbow Falls will virtually eliminate the latency and will make it practical for companies to use cryptography more widely.

For online banking sites, this on-chip security accelerator will give them better performance. These types of sites require small packets of data to be encrypted, because of all the fields and graphical elements that tend to appear on the page. Traffic to and from those sites is encrypted today, but at a substantial cost to CPU performance.

Specifics on release dates were not given since Sun's acquisition by Oracle is ongoing. Oracle has said it plans to continue development of Sun's SPARC chips.

More Information

Rainbow Falls - slide presentation by Sanjay Patel, Hot Chips 21 Conference (courtesy of Joerg Moellenkamp)

Sun's 3rd generation on-chip UltraSPARC security accelerator - slide presentation by Lawrence Spracklen, Hot Chips 21 Conference (courtesy of Moellenkamp)

UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus Processors

Using busstat to Monitor Performance Counters for UltraSPARC T2 Plus External Coherency Hub Architecture

Hot Chips Conference [...read more...]

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