5 ms·
Those machines with like a 100 cores were miserable, they were all super slow. So it’s only useful if you have c code or something fast. Any kind of webserving
by kanwisher 4y ago
Those machines with like a 100 cores were miserable, they were all super slow. So it’s only useful if you have c code or something fast. Any kind of webserving code ran faster on a dual core amd machine
- bayindirh 4y agoThey were designed to be front end machines, and XML parsers. They were meant to handle the incoming workload and handle a lot of light threads. DB and other CRUD stuff was meant to be offloaded to backend servers with beefier processors. They had shared FPUs, so anything ALU oriented fell flat on them, even Sun openly admitted that. So they were not meant to be SMP supercomputer nodes, but to reduce number of front end server counts and allowed datacenter floor to be available for more backend servers and storage.
- chasil 4y agoIn the Ultrasparc T2 (Niagra 2), each core had its own floating point hardware. The wiki says that the T2 was over 10x faster than the T1 for floating point arithmetic. "One floating point unit per core, up from just one FPU for the entire chip... Better floating-point throughput (>10x improvement)... Better floating-point single-thread performance (>5x improvement)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 The T1 and T2 were both open-sourced. I would love to have a dual-core T2 implementation on a Raspberry PI, with completely open hardware. https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-page.html https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...