Lots have been written about that, but this might be a good starting point: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-146.pdf http://www.eecs.be

Lots have been written about that, but this might be a good starting point: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-146.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-14..., but read also the spec (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2011/EECS-2011-62.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2011/EECS-2011-62...) and pay attention to the footnotes. IMO, compared to OpenSPARC, this is a fresh design that leverages lessons learned from everything that proceeded it. There are many problems with SPARC that makes it hard & expensive to scale up and down.