UltraSparc T2 chip gets speed bump

Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu have announced that it will now sell servers with UltraSparc T2 chips that have speeds up to 1.6GHz. The previous top speed was 1.4Ghz.

One of the criticisms of the UltraSparc chip is that it runs at a lower frequency than other RISC/EPIC processors, especially when compared to IBM’s Power chip. That presumably puts it at a disadvantage when it comes to online transaction processing and performing trades, for example.

David Simon, a chairman at software as a service (SaaS) company SearchForce.com, is a Sun server user who said that though the UltraSparc’s frequency might be low compared to Power, its bus architecture allows more transactions to be processed in parallel, thus completing more total transactions in the same amount of time.