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. 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.