Niagara: A 32-Way Multithreaded Sparc Processor

Abstract

The Niagara processor implements a thread-rich architecture designed to provide a high-performance solution for commercial server applications. This is an entirely new implementation of the Sparc V9 architectural specification, which exploits large amounts of on-chip parallelism to provide high throughput. The hardware supports 32 threads with a memory subsystem consisting of an on-board crossbar, level-2 cache, and memory controllers for a highly integrated design that exploits the thread-level parallelism inherent to server applications, while targeting low levels of power consumption.