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I think your conclusion, "end for world-beating SPARC performance", is perhaps based on out of date information: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance

• hapless 12y ago
  Oracle's current chips are derived from the massively-multicore Niagara, not from Rock or UltraSPARC III/IV. As a result, you might notice that the benchmarks Oracle brags about are SPECjbb and TPC-C. These are benchmarks that reward integer perf and parallelism, not single-thread or floating-point performance. On SPEC's general purpose benchmark, SPECcpu, Oracle published only three SPARC results. All three are from Fujitsu chips in re-branded Fujitsu systems. Oracle just doesn't publish results for their in-house chips. I imagine they ran the benchmarks and decided the poor results did not fit their marketing message. http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html
  • binarycrusader 12y ago
    Oracle has actually published other SPARC results that are not for Fujitsu chips for SPEC CPU: https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_speccpu2006_rate https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_sp... http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html While I can't provide you my own detailed benchmarks, I can tell you anecdotally that the most recent SPARC hardware has significantly better single-threaded performance than the early T1, T2 series. As an example, one of the projects I work on is written almost entirely in Python, and so is almost completely single-threaded (only the transport is multi-threaded using libcurl). I had an opportunity to compare the performance on the T5 to the T1 and found it was practically night and day, and the performance of the program seems just as snappy as it does on any Xeon system I've used. Anecdotally, I can tell you that given a choice between a fully-loaded Xeon box or one of the newest SPARC servers, most of the developers I work with will choose the SPARC server simply because builds take significantly less time.
    • hapless 12y ago
      Those are the SPECint_rate benchmarks, for throughput. These are different from the regular SPECint, and they're published separately. Oracle has published no regular SPECcpu scores. Even the rate benchmarks are not very impressive. Oracle rigged the comparison in their press release. They compare a 16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel. If we do apples-to-apples, the Oracle result is pretty humdrum: - Oracle T5-1B, 16-core SPARC, 436 / 467 - Dell M520, 16-core Intel, 533 / 553 The M520 contains 2x E5-2450@2.1 GHz. This is far from the fastest Intel chip. You can get them up to 3.6 GHz. It's just a common and inexpensive configuration. Let's not even talk about the respective pricing. Personally, I haven't used anything newer than a T1. Because I haven't seen anyone buy a new Sun box in that long!
      • hga 12y ago
        Given the vastly different design philosophies of these two architectures, why is a comparison of a "16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel" inherently rigged? Aren't those SPARC cores a lot smaller than x86_64 cores? I mean, the first SPARC CPU was implemented on 2 20,000 gate Fujitsu gate-arrays (2nd was the floating point unit)....
      • binarycrusader 12y ago
        Your initial implication was that SPARC wasn't setting any world-records anymore, when I proved that wasn't the case, you then proceeded to complain about an arbitrary benchmark. When I pointed out that results were provided for that benchmark, you then complained that it wasn't for the general benchmark but a portion of it. You then proceeded to claim it wasn't an Apples-to-Apples comparison, but Oracle doesn't offer anything less than 16 cores for a T5. I don't think comparing products that don't exist is very useful so attempting to extrapolate what an 8-core version might be seems silly, especially since there's not a one-to-one correlation between cores and performance. In addition to that, at last check, you can't pick the number of cores (precisely) that you want a processor to have when purchasing so it doesn't make any sense (in my personal opinion) to strictly compare core-to-core performance, since, as the other poster pointed out, core is essentially a definition at the whim of a vendor. So, I'll just stick to refuting your original implication -- that SPARC isn't setting world-records anymore; it is in fact doing so. And in fact, SPARC continues to have far greater memory bandwidth, I/O bandwidth, and memory capacity compared to general Intel offerings. So if you want to find out how fast a T5 will actually run your application, try one out and get real data instead of relying on benchmarks to make your decision. Personally, I think you'd be shocked at just how well most workloads perform if you actually tried a T5. As to the price argument, the companies I've worked for or with in the past generally didn't care about that so much as the reliability of the system and it's capability. They have workloads that consume multiple terabytes of memory. They're using the servers to process transactions that are netting them millions of dollars with the servers they use, so saving a few thousand bucks doesn't matter to them. In the end, you have to use the right tools for the right job. There's a reason that Oracle sells x86 servers too. Personally, I don't care which architecture is being used as long as I get to use Solaris/ZFS.