Sun/Oracle Sparc and IBM Power 7 Processors

It will be interesting to see how those 2 designs will compete for customers...

clipped from arstechnica.com Two billion-transistor beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3 Niagara 3: threads and I/O At 1.2 billion transistors, IBM's new 45nm POWER7 processor is only a little bigger than Niagara 3, but it couldn't be more different. If Niagara 3 is an army of guys with shovels, POWER7 is a giant bulldozer. Sun's 1 billion-transistor, 16-core Niagara 3 processor is a great example of modern multiprocessor-turned-SoC (system on a chip). Everything about this design is focused on pushing large numbers of parallel instruction streams and data streams through the processor socket at once. IBM's POWER7 Sun's Niagara is aimed at networked server operations where lots of simultaneous, lightweight requests have to be serviced—databases, Web servers, and the like. In contrast, POWER7 has the horsepower to grind through a smaller number of more compute-intensive tasks at a high rate of speed Both parts have their place in the server ecosystem of 2010.