Old style dual core CPU

Sun Microsystems plans to launch a dual core processor called Gemini next year. The interesting thing is that it won’t use their latest and greatest Ultrasparc III core, but rather have two of the old and retired Ultrasparc II on the same die.

“Gemini can be called a 2-1-4 chip, … meaning that the chip has two cores, and each core can handle one application thread and four instructions (or tasks) per thread at once.”

The idea is to reduce power consumption and it seems to be working well, as  Sun claims that Gemini uses 14 to 32 watts depending on its clockfrequency. 2 CPUs for only 32 watts? Nice! And the next chip sounds brutal:

“The successor chip, called Niagara will come with eight cores, and each core will handle four threads with one instruction per thread at once, for a total of 32 instructions.”

Read more here.