Sun's Niagara 2 to run at 1.4GHz

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems' forthcoming Niagara 2 processor will run at a core clock frequency of 1.4GHz, one of the processor's engineers said Monday.

Sun's Umesh Nawathe disclosed the chip speed during a speech at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here. Sun had been mum about the clock speed before.

Sun's first-generation UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"-based servers are the first of a new generation of chips designed for "throughput"--getting many tasks done simultaneously if not necessarily completing each task as swiftly. Toward this end, Niagara has eight processor cores, with each core able to run four instruction sequences called threads.

Niagara 2 also has eight cores, but each core can execute eight threads. As with Niagara, Sun will be able to sell chips even when defects mean some of the cores can't be used, Nawathe said.