4 ms·
Sadly the T1/T2 are ancient now. The non-open SPARC is up to T7, which is 20nm process, 256 threads on 32 cores.
by apaprocki 10y ago
Sadly the T1/T2 are ancient now. The non-open SPARC is up to T7, which is 20nm process, 256 threads on 32 cores.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoSort of. I run the bloated Web, movies, IDE's, servers, and VM's on a Core Duo with 2 cores under 2GHz done on 65nm. I'd loose some single-threaded performance probably with an OpenSPARC T2 but otherwise it should handle my modern workload. Doesn't quite feel ancient. ;) The cool thing about open-source CPU's is one can always improve on them to, say, have an extra dozen cores on more recent nodes. Like Oracle does but probably less impressive with less money.
- apaprocki 10y agoAs a 2011 MBA user, I totally understand sticking with old tech that works. T1/T2 isn't really apples-to-apples, though. I came across this random quote from the libgmp devs that made me laugh: "SPARC chips before T4 under-perform on GMP. This is not because the GMP code is inadequately optimised for SPARC, but due to the basic v9 ISA as well as the micro-architecture of these chips. The T1 and T2 chips perform worse than any other SPARC chips; they compare to a 15 year older 486 chip." ouch!
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOuch indeed. That's pretty bad. It's believable when I think back to the purpose of these chips: handling workloads that were more I/O and concurrency bound than CPU bound. So, probably identify and eliminate these problems early on even if developer has to drop some threads or cores. Note: There's always my other recommendation of turning open-source Leon3 into a multicore. Im curious what it or Leon4 get on such a benchmark versus Intels on similar process nodes.
- pgeorgi 10y agoSome anecdata: Somebody tried to use a university department's T2 because it was unused and reasonably parallel for some experiment on hashing. Single core SHA1 speed on a t2 was ~300KB/s or so. Even with its 32 threads I recommended going for any ancient desktop that happened not to be used for a couple of days because the experiment would finish much faster there. Those desktops were about Core Duo class and managed 50-100MB/s SHA1 throughput (I think, it's been a couple of years).
- nickpsecurity 10y agoWhat the hell...??? Ok, it's looking like Im going to retract that recommendation for workstations. Maybe still servers thst are I/O bound.