UltraSPARC T1

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UltraSPARC T1

Logo introduced in 2006
General information
Launched	November 14, 2005; 18 years ago (2005-11-14)
Designed by	Sun Microsystems
Common manufacturer	Texas Instruments
Performance
Max. CPU clock rate	1.0 GHz to 1.4 GHz
Architecture and classification
Instruction set	SPARC V9
Physical specifications
Cores	4, 6, 8
Products, models, variants
Core name	S1
History
Successor	UltraSPARC T2

The UltraSPARC T1 (codenamed "Niagara") is a multithreading, multicore CPU released by Sun Microsystems in 2005. Designed to lower the energy consumption of server computers, the CPU typically uses 72 W of power at 1.4 GHz.

The T1 is a new-from-the-ground-up SPARC microprocessor implementation that conforms to the UltraSPARC Architecture 2005 specification^[1] and executes the full SPARC V9 instruction set. Sun has produced two previous multicore processors (UltraSPARC IV and IV+), but UltraSPARC T1 was its first microprocessor that is both multicore and multithreaded. Security was built-in from the very first release on silicon, with hardware cryptographic units in the T1, unlike general purpose processor from competing vendors of the time. The processor is available with four, six or eight CPU cores, each core able to handle four threads concurrently. Thus, the processor is capable of processing up to 32 threads concurrently.

The UltraSPARC T1 can be partitioned in a similar way to high-end Sun SMP systems. Thus, several cores can be partitioned for running a single or group of processes and/or threads, while the other cores deal with the rest of the processes on the system.