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I'm a little biased through once having developed on Sun's Niagara processors. Early versions of these had pretty terrible single core (thread? I forget their e
by joosters 12y ago
I'm a little biased through once having developed on Sun's Niagara processors. Early versions of these had pretty terrible single core (thread? I forget their exact terminology) performance. The theoretical power of the processor was huge but any time you hit a single-threaded program you felt it. ssh logins were slow, for example!
- rwmj 12y agoI've been compiling libguestfs, libvirt, the kernel, qemu, and other programs, and using the aarch64 machine interactively, and it certainly doesn't feel slow. I have to be careful about exactly what I say here because the NDA prevents me from doing any kind of performance benchmarking (for good reasons: this is pre-release hardware and the performance doesn't reflect what the final hardware will be capable of), but ... performance is fine, I've had no problem with either single-threaded tasks or parallel compiles. Given I'm using it as a remote machine over ssh, it doesn't "feel" any different from an x86-64 server.
- joosters 12y agon.b. I wasn't very clear in my comment; my experience was on the original Niagara 1 & 2, this was about 7-8 years ago, I'd guess. Hopefully things have improved since :)
- kjs3 12y agoIt shouldn't be surprising that Niagra is slow on single threads. The whole point of the design was to support parallel, non-interactive tasks (e.g. databases) at the expense of non-threaded workloads. It was a design trade-off that Sun was very up front about. Even N1 & N2 gave remarkable price/performance numbers when used for the tasks it was designed for.