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Sun's Zippy New Chips
Mark the Revelator writes: "Reuters has a story about Sun unveiling it's latest and greatest UltraSparcIII chips. The new chips are being made by TI and are the first UltraSparcs to use copper instead of aluminum for transistor connections. Although they're supposed to compete with Intel's Itanium chips, they only run at 900MHz ... for now."
Although they're supposed to compete with Intel's Itanium chips, they only run at 900MHz ... for now."
Itanium only run at 733 or 800MHz
Hmm, Not really.
I mean, yeah, they're totally different. And they're faster clock-per-clock (with added benefit to FP stuff).
But a 1.4GHz Athlon blows away a 7-800MHz UltraII for most kinds of computation. A 1 GHz Athlon seems to be about (42, 29) on the (retired) SPECint95/SPECfp95. A 450Mhz Ultra-II (not Ultra-IIi, I'm looking at results for an SPARCstation Ultra-60) gets about (20, 27). That's a bit faster int clock-per-clock, and a lot faster FP. Note that for practical stuff (databases, web, whatever) int is more important. Of course benchmarks are hard to interpret, but this gives you an idea. All the SPEC benchmarks are available at www.specbench.org. Of course there are no Ultra-III results, but I'm guessing it's not going to be 2x as fast as the best x86s (at least I'll wait to see the results before I believe it).
You use a Sun because you want an architecture that will scale smoothly up to 64-way (I *guarantee* that will be faster than any single x86 machine).
Actually if you want to both go fast at the low end and scale well, you can buy an RS/6000 -- IBMs Power3 and Power4 chips are absurdly fast and scale very well (and actually focus on memory bandwidth for database performance). But a bottom-of-the-line Sun is a lot cheaper than the cheapest RS/6000.
Full disclosure: I work for IBM (in software) and I've seen a good bit of internal stuff about IBM chips, esp. the upcoming Power4. Most of that information has now been published in MicroProcessor Review and is now publicly available, I think you'll find it if you poke around...
(even more amusing full disclosure: I'm a huge fan of old Sun stuff, their machines are beautifully engineered. i use a couple old 32bit sparcs for all kinds of things)
Just because the MHz on the Sun equipment (900MHz) is lower than the current Pentium (1.5MHz), don't be fooled into thinking the Intel hardware is better. What matters after all, is throughput and pumping that data. Check your specs!
Check this 4 CPU Intel vs the 1 CPU Sun considering plain speed...
CINT2000: Intel Corporation Intel D850GB motherboard(1.5 GHz, Pentium 4 processor) - 536 524
CFP2000: Intel Corporation Intel D850GB motherboard(1.5 GHz, Pentium 4 processor) - 558 549
CINT2000: Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1900 - 467 438
CFP2000: Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1900 - 482 427
CINT2000: Advanced Micro Devices Tyan Thunder K7 Motherboard, 1.2GHz Athlon MP Processor - 522 495
CFP2000: Advanced Micro Devices Tyan Thunder K7 Motherboard, 1.2GHz Athlon MP Processor - 481 433
Throughput on the Sun with 2 CPU, but strangely enough, none for any Intel hardware. Throw a 2 CPU AMD in there, though...
CINT2000 rate: Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 2900 - 10.7 9.97
CFP2000 rate: Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 2900 - 10.2 9.09
CINT2000 rate: Advanced Micro Devic Tyan Thunder K7 Motherboard, 1.2GHz 2CPU - 10.8 11.1
CFP2000 rate: Advanced Micro Devic Tyan Thunder K7 Motherboard, 1.2GHz 2CPU - 8.30 9.14
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
keep in mind that these are pure RISC processors and have always toasted any CISC or CISC-to-RISC processor of a much higher processor rating.
uh, more bits doesn't mean a faster cpu. in fact, it means pointers are twice as long, which means they take up twice the cache and twice the memory bandwidth. the fact that most 64bit cpus are faster than more 32bit cpus has absolutely nothing to do with them being 64bit.
Where the real advantages come in is with things like memory architectures (eg, memory interleaving) and bus speeds (where the system bandwidth is more than an x86 solution) which is relevant in databases. Added to that, you can scale these up much more (the E6800 can have 24 900MHz CPU's, for instance; Fujitsu have recently released a 128 CPU system based on their USII clone at 500+MHz).
If you want a measure of raw CPU performance, check www.spec.org; currently, the fastest single CPU systems are Intel P4's (although some alphas come damn close). The Sun 280R doesn't come close to that, although it is faster than its clock speed would suggest...
I work with Ultra 10s, 60, and 80s daily. From the normal work, UltraSPARC chips do things about twice the speed of a similarly 'clocked' Pentium chip.
UltraSPARC 450s do things about the same time as Pentium 900s, etc.
These should be screamers. Don't be fooled by the number attached to the chip.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Not really, the more stuff you put into a chip, the more complicated the layout and the more difficult it is to guarentee signal integrity at higher clock speeds. Remember there is propagation delay, cross talk, and power supply and ground concerns that must be addressed. Adding more landscape to the chip can help, like with caching, (Xeon's for example), but pretty soon you'll end up with the equivalent of a SMP machine, in one chip, which doesn't make sense financially.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
The UltraSPARCIII chips running at "only" 900mhz is still much faster than a Pentium class chip running at equivalent speeds. This is completely different architecture than x86.
Just look at the requirements to run the various Windows OSs. When Windows 95 came out, the bare minimum to run it was a 386DX at 33mhz, 4MB RAM, and a 100MB hard drive. Windows ME requires, at a minimum, a 150mhz Pentium, 32MB of RAM, and 480MB of hard drive space. The RAM requirements have quadrupled, the hard drive space has gone up by a factor of five, and CPU power has gone up by somewhere around a factor of 10. (I know that there is some disagreement about what the actual minimums are, but I believe these to be in the ballpark and they illustrate my point.)
So, if you want to find out what the CPU is capable of, dump the OS, write an application that taxes the CPU, and run it on each. (No, you do not need an OS to run a program.) Until you do that, you're just tossing around meaningless numbers.