Sun announced the world’s fastest commodity microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T2, the industry’s first volume processor with eight cores and eight threads per core.

Formerly known as the “Niagara 2″ project, the UltraSPARC T2’s world-record performance raises the bar on commodity processors while boasting the industry’s highest energy efficiency per thread. With each thread capable of running its own operating system, the chip delivers a whopping 64-way system on a single chip. Sun will provide the UltraSPARC T2 processor design to the free and open source community via the GPL license.

The UltraSPARC T2 is the industry’s first processor to bring together the key functions of multiple systems-virtualization, processing, networking, security, floating point units and accelerated memory access. As a general-purpose processor, the UltraSPARC T2 provides support for the massively threaded, open source Solaris operating system, and other real-time operating systems, as well as future versions of Ubuntu Linux, bringing a massive community of developers and productivity to the growing market.

This next generation of the UltraSPARC family of processors also extends its lead in eco performance, bringing Sun’s CoolThreads chip multithreading (CMT) technology to the UltraSPARC T2 processor, powered by fewer than two watts per thread. At one-tenth to one-thirtieth the power consumption of competitive offerings, the UltraSPARC T2 processor sets the gold standard for green computing and efficiency, combining the industry’s lowest power consumption with double the cores, 16 times the threads, 4 times the throughput, with on-chip network and security functionality.

The UltraSPARC T2 processor integrates dual, virtualizable, multithreaded 10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports with built-in packet classification for fast access to networks and server-to-server communications. Eight cryptographic acceleration units and a total of 10 independent functions address security needs, including NSA-approved algorithms. Eight floating point units extend the benefits of CMT to high-performance computing workloads for scientific applications. Eight lanes of industry-standard PCI Express I/O speed applications like streaming media, database read/write and data back-up. Quad memory controllers deliver more than 50 Gigabytes-per-second of memory access.

In production now, Sun’s UltraSPARC T2 processor offers more consolidation and virtualization flexibility than any processor in its class. With up to 64 logical domains per processor, customers can achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency by consolidating many physically separate systems onto a single UltraSPARC T2 processor-based platform.

The UltraSPARC T2 processor is available in production quantities this quarter, with prices starting well below $1,000, and licensing options wide open for derivative works.