← Back to context

Comment by hapless

4 years ago

Sun experimented with an UltraSPARC-branded ultra-wide CMT design in their last days -- Niagara. It was very unsuccessful, because, realistically, what can you do with 32 low-performance cores that you couldn't do with 8 high-performance cores?

The answer turned out to be "nothing"

------------

The "conventional" UltraSPARC designs -- US IIi, US IIIi, US IV, and the canceled "Rock" project -- were just really very mediocre chips sold at tens of times the cost of a similar x86.