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Sun's Zippy New Chips

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ra-would-approve dept.

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."

3 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Traffic Jam by beanerspace · · Score: 5, Insightful
    MHz, 900 or otherwise doesn't really mean that much in light of how much traffic a computer can bus. Meaning, what good is it to process really fast if after processing, instructions get bogged down in a traffic jam getting back down to the backplane, up and down memory and/or various interface boards ?

    Part of Sun's success is how well they address the bus/throughput issue, as opposed to 'other' computer architectures. And that's why JUST comparing MHz is like comparing apples and oranges.

    Or perhaps a better anology is comparing a Formula 1 Racing car stuck in down-town NYC Traffic, versus a 6 cylinder Honda Accord on flat, wide-open highway in Montanta, during the daytime when the weather is perfect.

    --

    healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
  2. Re:RISC/CISC by color+of+static · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those terms don't apply well with modern processors. Pentiums class processors are primarly CISC with some RISC features/ideas (not many though). The Sparc family has been RISC with a lot of complexity thus making them be more CISC than say the Alpha. That has historically been why their clockspeed is lower than alpha, but still performs about the same for general purpose computing.
    The Itanium is a branch off of a different tree, Very Long Instruction Word, which is a branch off of RISC. VLIW let's a compiler pack multiple commands to multiple execution units into a single long word. The idea is to use very RISCy commands to keep a superscalar set of execution units more fully utilized. Great idea, if your compiler can do it.

  3. Slight nit to pick... by emil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As you implied, SMP performance is extremely important to people who buy Sun.

    In this case, you wouldn't care much how an individual processor performed; you are most concerned with the performace of, say, a 32-way system and it's ability to quickly shuttle data between processors, memory, and disk.

    Our beloved Athlon only scales to 2-way, and it's SMP architecture is now being entirely redesigned with the NUMA hypertransport.

    Sun probably suffers in raw MHz and SPEC scores because they put so much effort into the SMP aspects.

    And, of course, Sun outsells some (arguably) better technology (Power, Alpha) because they are much more open and their service organization is superior.