3 ms·

This inadvertant leak could be in Sun's favour because they've already got faster chips shipping.

by xirium 19y ago

wmf 19y ago
Sun is shipping faster chips than Nehalem?
- xirium 19y ago
  "At the time of its release in December of 2005, a single chip, eight core, 32-thread, 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 server performed similarly to a two-socket, four-core, eight-thread, 1.9 GHz IBM POWER5 server, performed similarly to a four socket, eight-core, sixteen-thread 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon "Paxville MP" server, and exceeded the performance of a four socket, four-core, four-thead 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium server. Arguably, this made the UltraSPARC T1 the world's most powerful general-purpose commercial server processors, when considering multithreaded commercial workloads. ... One customer has published results showing that a MySQL application running on an UltraSPARC T1 server ran 13.5 times faster than on an AMD Opteron server." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 In October 2007, the T2 made significant improvements ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 ) - most notably a 10-fold improvement in floating-point throughput.
  - wmf 19y ago
    I am aware of Niagara, and I am skeptical that it will beat Nehalem. Certainly a Nehalem system will beat a Niagara 2 system in most benchmarks for performance and price.
  - peterlaurens 19y ago
    UltraSPARCs are rather specialised for general purpose processors - one could make the arguments that GPUs, which massively outperform x86 CPUs several times over in terms of FP performance, were faster even than SPARC, but it's very much a different beast. Also I haven't looked this up but isn't UltraSPARC much more costly? Basically: Apples and Oranges etc.
    - xirium 19y ago
      Given the rising cost of energy, companies include it in the cost of ownership. So, if you had a server which was 13.5 times more powerful and consumed the same energy then you'd definitely save money. Unfortunately, SPARC would cost more up-front. So, for a fast growing company, using x86 may reduce opportunity cost. For a large, steady company, a rolling replacement programme of SPARC may be the best option.

This inadvertant leak could be in Sun's favour because they've already got faster chips shipping.

by xirium 19y ago

This inadvertant leak could be in Sun's favour because they've already got faster chips shipping.

wmf 19y ago

Sun is shipping faster chips than Nehalem?

xirium 19y ago
"At the time of its release in December of 2005, a single chip, eight core, 32-thread, 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 server performed similarly to a two-socket, four-core, eight-thread, 1.9 GHz IBM POWER5 server, performed similarly to a four socket, eight-core, sixteen-thread 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon "Paxville MP" server, and exceeded the performance of a four socket, four-core, four-thead 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium server. Arguably, this made the UltraSPARC T1 the world's most powerful general-purpose commercial server processors, when considering multithreaded commercial workloads. ... One customer has published results showing that a MySQL application running on an UltraSPARC T1 server ran 13.5 times faster than on an AMD Opteron server." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 In October 2007, the T2 made significant improvements ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 ) - most notably a 10-fold improvement in floating-point throughput.
- wmf 19y ago
  I am aware of Niagara, and I am skeptical that it will beat Nehalem. Certainly a Nehalem system will beat a Niagara 2 system in most benchmarks for performance and price.
- peterlaurens 19y ago
  UltraSPARCs are rather specialised for general purpose processors - one could make the arguments that GPUs, which massively outperform x86 CPUs several times over in terms of FP performance, were faster even than SPARC, but it's very much a different beast. Also I haven't looked this up but isn't UltraSPARC much more costly? Basically: Apples and Oranges etc.
  - xirium 19y ago
    Given the rising cost of energy, companies include it in the cost of ownership. So, if you had a server which was 13.5 times more powerful and consumed the same energy then you'd definitely save money. Unfortunately, SPARC would cost more up-front. So, for a fast growing company, using x86 may reduce opportunity cost. For a large, steady company, a rolling replacement programme of SPARC may be the best option.