Sun is ready to unleash a fireball onto the server market. The company claims (just like car makers whenever they revamp a product line) that the new 1.2GHz UltraSparc T1 (codename Niagara) is more powerful, faster and more efficient than its predecessor. "Niagara" has 8 cores, but there will also be four and six core versions of the processor available (these being Niagra with defective cores).

The UltraSparc T1, code-named Niagara, uses about 70 watts of electricity, closer to that of standard household light bulbs, and less than the 150 watts to 200 watts that most microprocessors in servers consume.

The T1, which has eight processing "cores" on a single piece of silicon to give it more computing power, will be the brains of a line of forthcoming Sun Fire servers due by year's end and that run Sun's Solaris version of the Unix operating system.

This news article was written on November 15, 2005, quoting Reuters.