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Sun Microsystems Inc. on Sunday announced its latest microprocessor that is more powerful than its predecessors, uses less electricity, and is one part of the company's plan to return to sustainable revenue and profit growth. The UltraSparc T1, code-named Niagara, uses about 70 watts of electricity, closer to that of standard household light bulbs, and less than the 150 watts to 200 watts that most microprocessors in servers consume. The T1, which has eight processing "cores" on a single piece of silicon to give it more computing power, will be the brains of a line of forthcoming Sun Fire servers due by year's end and that run Sun's Solaris version of the Unix operating system. Sun, the No. 3 server maker, has fallen on hard times since the implosion of the dot-com and telecommunications investment booms in late 2000 and has not bounced back as quickly as rivals Hewlett-Packard Co. and International Business Machines Corp. In the second quarter Sun's worldwide server revenue declined 5.3 percent to $1.37 billion (785 million pounds) while those of IBM, the No. 1 server maker, rose 4.1 percent to $3.89 billion, and those of HP, the No. 2 vendor, increased 11.5 percent to $3.48 billion. To respond, Sun has revamped its products to reflect an industry shift to lower-cost computer servers, namely those using Intel Corp.-compatible chips made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., and is moving to a more subscription-based model for selling its hardware, computer services and business software. "It's an integral part of the turnaround strategy for Sun," said Vernon Turner, an analyst at technology market research firm IDC. "This is a fairly versatile offering for the marketplace right now." The T1's eight cores can each handle four instruction sequences for a total of 32, and Sun's Chief Operating Officer, Jonathan Schwartz, said that it now has a five-year leap on the Power chip from IBM and Intel's Xeon processor, two competing chips. "It is a linchpin of the turnaround but it's not the only one," Schwartz said in a telephone interview, pointing to Sun's expanded line-up of servers that use AMD's Opteron processors, its Java Enterprise System collection of network, identity management and other business software, its grid computing offerings and its subscription-based product offerings. "You may have noticed we haven't had a performance advantage with Sparc in the past few years, now we have an irrefutable performance advantage," Schwartz said. Schwartz also said the T1's lower power consumption is more than about the conservation of natural resources and protecting the environment. Power consumption in data centres has increasingly become a hot topic for those that manage them. "I don't think doing good for the planet has to be inconsistent with doing good for our shareholders," Schwartz said. Jordan said the energy-sipping TI chips, compared to rivals', could resonate well with customers who buy Sun's Sparc-Solaris servers. "Given that power (consumption) is one of the data center hot and heavy buzzwords right now, they'll probably get some attention," IDC's Vernon said, referring to the T1 chip. - Reuters