Cores
The UltraSPARC T1 was designed from scratch as a multi-threaded, special-purpose processor, and thus introduces a whole new architecture for obtaining high performance. Rather than try to make each core as intelligent and optimized as they can, Sun's goal was to run as many concurrent threads as possible, and maximize utilization of each core's pipeline.
The T1's cores are less complex than those of current high end processors in order to allow 8 cores to fit on the same die. The cores do not feature out-of-order execution, or a sizable amount of cache. Single-thread processors depend heavily on large caches for their performance because cache misses result in a wait while the data is fetched from main memory. By making the cache larger the probability of a cache miss is reduced, but the impact of a miss is still the same.
The T1 cores largely side-step the issue of cache misses by multithreading. Each core is a barrel processor, meaning it switches between available threads each cycle. When a long-latency event occurs, such as cache miss, the thread is taken out of rotation while the data is fetched into cache in the background. Once the long-latency event completes, the thread is made available for execution again. Sharing of the pipeline by multiple threads may make each thread slower, but the overall throughput (and utilization) of each core is much higher. It also means that the impact of cache misses is greatly reduced, and the T1 can maintain high throughput with a smaller amount of cache. The cache no longer needs to be large enough to hold all or most of the "working set", just the recent cache misses of each thread.
Benchmarks demonstrate this approach has worked very well on commercial (integer), multithreaded workloads such as Java application servers, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application servers, email (such as Lotus Domino) servers, and web servers. These benchmarks suggest each core in the UltraSPARC T1 is more powerful than the circa 2001, single-core, single-threaded UltraSPARC III, and at a chip to chip comparison, significantly outperforms other processors on multithreaded integer workloads.
Read more about this topic: Ultra SPARC T1