Sun recently announced a new server, the Sun Fire T2000.

This server has eight cores and four threads per core. It can run 32 different things simultaneously—32 searches, 32 database threads, 32 Java application server threads—all of that simultaneously.

Marc Tremblay

Each core runs at 1.2Ghz. I'm not much of a hardware guy, so I don't know if that means (with a perfectly parallizable software) a performance roughly equal to 9.6Ghz or 38.4Ghz processor, but both numbers are pretty big.

In comparison, Intel's state of the art is 2 cores with 2 threads for a total for 4 simultaneous threads. The Playstation 3 has a PowerPC chip with 2 cores and 7 vector processing units for 9 simultaneous threads.

Anyway, back to the T2000. $7795 gets you: Sixteen DIMM slots for a maximum system support of 32GB of RAM. Four 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet ports, 4 USB 1.1 ports (boo, why not USB 2?), Three PCI-Express slots with support for 1x, 4x or 8x, two PCI-X slots with 64 bit 133 Mhz card. Up to four 73 GB 10K rpm SAS disk for a maximum capacity of 292GB. A "Slimeline" DVD-R/CD-RW drive. Two redundant, hot swappable power supplies with a peak output of 400W, and a continuous output of 325W. You can download the PDF with the full specs.

Don't expect the T2000 to run Windows though; right now, it only supports the Solaris operating system.

This is one of the reasons I wish more software were written in Java. Having our programs written in Java liberates us from operating systems. One of the main reasons I (and probably almost everyone else) stays with Windows is that all of our favorite apps don't exist on Linux. And I occasionally get MacOSX envy, because they've got some really nice applications which don't exist on Windows.

Oh yeah, Sun is also making a big deal about how their CPUs consume less power, and emits less heat. The server is targetted to those data centers which have racks and racks of server, and need to install air conditioners in the rooms to cool their computers. But I don't really care about that. I'd just like to own an 8 core processor.