Sun Microsystems has announced the launch of its UltraSparc T1 chip, previously codenamed Niagara.

The chip is more powerful than its predecessors, uses less electricity, and is dubbed by Sun as "the world's first eco-responsible processor" due to its low power consumption.

The multi-threaded, multi-core UltraSparc T1 uses about 70 watts of electricity, considerably less than the 150 to 200 watts that most microprocessors in servers consume, according to the firm.

It has eight processing 'cores' on a single piece of silicon which will form the heart of a line of forthcoming Sun Fire servers due by the end of the year that run Sun's Solaris version of Unix.

Jonathan Schwartz, chief operating officer at Sun, claimed that the chip gives the firm a five-year leap on IBM's Power and Intel's Xeon processors.

"We have not had a performance advantage with Sparc in the past few years, but now we have an irrefutable performance advantage," he said.

Details of how the Ultrasparc T1 will fit into Sun's server range are expected next month.