"The UltraSPARC T2 makes possible a new breed of compact, power-efficient, highly integrated devices--going beyond servers to routers, switches, network devices, medical imaging, industrial printing and more," said David Yen, executive vice president of Microelectronics for Sun.

The chip's thrifty, energy efficient design continues Sun's commitment to delivering eco-friendly processors, systems, programs, and services to help enterprises reduce environmental impact and energy costs.

"This is truly a system on a chip," said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for Microelectronics at Sun. "Nobody in the world has even a fraction of the threads we are delivering. And we've taken major steps with the integration of additional chip multi-threading capabilities right on the chip. When it comes to serving the thread-rich environment that's growing out there, this is the highest performance processor in the industry."

Sun's new UltraSPARC T2 processor raises the chip multi-threading (CMT) bar set in 2005 by the UltraSPARC T1 processor. The new version is unique in that it scales its performance through threading, not through increases in the clock speed, massive enlargement of the caches, or through packaging gimmicks, such as MultiChip Modules (MCMs).