Looks like Sun is finally making strides towards the x86 market, even while they adopt Opteron servers into their foray of products.  The question is, just how far can they go to be a top of the line competitors of today’s x86 market.  If some of the uniqueness of their x86 processor line is as accurate as described below, its possible they will give everyone a run for their money.
Niagara is notable for an unusual design that includes eight processing engines, or cores, each of which is capable of handling four instruction sequences called threads. Sun variously calls this approach “throughput computing” or “chip multithreading.”