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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."
Ars Technica has a fantastic article comparing and contrasting Sun's future MAJC (Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing) CPU architecture with Intel's IA-64. It's going to be very interesting to see if Sun can carve out a large enough market to ensure MAJC's viability. My uninformed opinion after reading the article--Sun has been making decisions since its founding that have given it the only chance to survive. By almost totally eschewing both Intel and Microsoft, Sun has been forced to innovate on both hardware and software to compete with these giants. Sun simply had to invent Java--what was the alternative, reselling NT "workstations"?! Now Sun has leveraged Java into strategic partnerships with IBM, Oracle, etc. to create from scratch a major software niche, not to mention Java's future in the embedded markets. MAJC it seems to me is the logical step in hardware once Sun made the commitment to Java and once Sun decided not to become a reseller of Intel chips like say HP. Without having to worry about what Intel wants, Sun can use its traditional RISC approach to registers to once again offer a fantastic alternative--read the Ars Technica article cited above: "MAJC, however, spends so much of its die space on registers that it can have the register states for four different threads loaded at once. Since it doesn't have to save and load register states to switch between threads, its context switches are very fast". In the 1980s HP saved the company investing in PA-RISC. Maybe that was because the engineer founders David Packard and Bill Hewlett were still alive and strong. I believe that it is Sun that has applied that lesson of not surrendering control over the CPU architecture, and that HP will continue to pay a heavy price for deciding to go with Intel. Financing new chip architectures is difficult, but in my opinion there is no future for being a reseller unless one is IBM or Dell. (And note that IBM resells only because it wants to since it already manufactures alternatives, it is beholden to no one. Just who will be able to compete with IBM's Global Services?)
P.S. I now have "only" 49 karma points. You've injured me to the core! hehehe
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
In general when comparing archtectures, then yes, some architectures are better than others at some things... but the x86 is CRAP AT EVERYTHING. IT SUCKS. IT HAS ALWAYS SUCKED.
;)
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I wouldn't go that far. It sound like trolling to me.
It is register starved, has a crappy "grown" CISC instruction set that's a bitch to optimise,
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I don't know about GCC, but Intel does a damn good job at it. (Check out Intel C++ 5.0)
has a wierd memory map that, again, is a bitch to optimise, tends to have crappy I/O throughput, cache coherency issues (related to aforementioned instrcution set and memory map),
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What "weird" memory map? I've actually read the whole x86 system designer docs, and the only wierdness is that I/O devices are mapped in at 640K instead of high up where they should be. That and the 4GB virtual address space (think big mmaps) but you can hardly fault it for being 32 bit.
highish latency on task switching
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Only if you use the standard TSS system (which nobody does). Plus, it has lots of optimizations (like global PTEs and delayed saving of the FP/SSE registers) that make task-switching quite speedy. Plus, from the (admittedly old) lmbench benchmarks, Linux 1.3 on x86 context switches faster than any other OS on any other platform. (www.bitmover.com/lmbench, I think). Plus, QNX manages to get. 4.5 microsecond task switches on Pentium-class processors, so I doubt x86 task switching is THAT slow.
(well... that depends on how enamoured you are of memory protection, of course - see AmigaOS/AROS on x86 for near-minimal latenncy, with no mem-protection...) and is JUST CRAP.
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QNX does memory protection (as does Linux
Basically, for a given MHz rating, the x86 will always come out slowest, no matter what test you do. Except running x86 binaries, of course...
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Actually, the P4 runs SSE ops *really* fast.
Thanks to Open Source, I can now happily use Linux on PPC and ARM boxes, and there's finally some nice, cheap PPC MoBos that aren't apple coming onto the market.
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So you want to pay more to get less functionality?
Seriously, x86 doesn't suck as much as you think it does. Intel and AMD have invested a huge amount of money in improving the architecture, and even if it is often slower in instructions per clock, the sheer clockspeed of x86 chips often make them outperform their competitors. Plus, they have great price/performance ratio.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Well, I've been happily using SUCKY computers since 1983. There's nothing more satisfying than using a really good kludge. Running a direct descendant of the world's first microprocessor (the Intel 4004) at thousands of times the original performance level is an awesome kludge. Throw in all of the goodies availible for x86 machines (OS's, apps, hardware) and its been like spending 18 years in a candy store.
You can stay up there in your ivory tower and watch the rest of us having fun down here in the fresh air.
I don't expect an UltraSparc comparison, but given that there are known performance issues in the P4 with "legacy" code, I wonder how easily that benchmark could have been stacked. How well would it compare with a PIII?
Or if you want a machine that was designed and built by engineers, not by a 14-year-old in his basement (or the Dell equivalent thereof).
I'm not a huge fan of Solaris, but Sun hardware is good stuff. I think SGI hardware is better stuff, or used to be before SGI decided it would be fun to implode.
You buy Sun if you want scalability and reliability. You buy Intel if money is an issue.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Know what makes me feel old? My first box ran at 4.77MHz. Yeah. 4.77. Umm. And it had two floppies! RaH! No hard drive, just two floppies.
And later I got a 300 baud modem. Double RaH.
Later,
daWiz
The Wizard's Realm - Telegard 2.0 - 686-0235
Duh!
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Won't somebody PLEASE think of the child processes?!?!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
An F1 stuck in down-town NYC would certainly attract more chicks than an Accord in Montana. Isn't that why we choose the flashiest hardware we can, to get more chicks? :-)
:-)
On the other hand, a sparc runs the software I want to run, and the software I earn tons of money from. So of course, having tons of money gets higher quality chicks better than any car
the AC
[not a politically correct post since I'm in a country which has outlawed 'Merkin correctness]
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Don't get me wrong, I love my Athlons, but I used to work in an HP based shop with PA-RISC all around. I'll never forget when the K-Class and N Class servers first came into our data center with the latest PA-RISC beasts - they were so fast it was scary (this was like 3 years ago)
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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)
The Itanium achieved some truely awesome SPEC-FP scores that made Sun look pretty bad. At FP, Itanium whales.
Itanium suffers from the same problems as the Pentium 4, in some ways, in that you can't ever branch. If you can find code that does this, and doesn't have many NOPs, the Itanium will perform very well. That doesn't describe much general-purpose code in the real world.
So, the crux of this is that Itaniums are faster at some things, just like the Pentium 4 is faster at some things. The risk is that these Intel processor applications are becomming highly specialized, and better general-purpose processors are available.
I think the UltraSPARC III is about 2-3 years late to the table.
The old RISC hardware chips are dying off slowly since they can't afford the build the kind of expensive Fabs that are needed to compete with Intel and AMD.
Except IBM, of course. I did read something about the Power4 (see also this pdf ) and its emphasis on maximizing memory BW - some of the figures sounded awesome. I was really looking forward to being able to pick and choose between Power4 and 21364(pdf), but Compaq seems to have throttled the Alpha. As if the IA-64 is better!
For scalability, though, I have to wonder if rack-mounted Alpha4's connected with high-speed interfaces like Myrinet could provide an alternative to hardware like a Sun ES10000. I haven't tried Scyld or MOSIX to know if they make using such clusters a "smoothly scalable" solution. The big Sun SMP machines are nice, but they're also expensive and the aging UltraSPARC II processors are nothing to write home about anymore.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Ther're so much more to buying Sun kit than CPU cycles.
You get (IMHO) the best OS you can run on a server (*incomparably* more reliable than Linux in my experience).
You get a better build quality than with PC class gear. (not so with the low-end Ultras I know, but have you tried carrying an E450 around lately?) I've worked with Sun boxes (mail hubs, NIS servers etc.) that haven't been swtiched off in 8 or 10 years.
You get excellent support - hardware or software. It costs, but it's worth it.
You get as much SMP as you could want.
You get insane amounts of addressable RAM and faster bus speeds.
In short kids, you get *proper computers* running a *proper OS*.
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."
...that I would never see the words "they only run at 900MHz". Okay, so I'm only 19, but I feel old now.
> keep in mind that these are pure RISC processors
... have always toasted any CISC or CISC-to-RISC" is a solid lie. There are plenty of occasions where a CISC processor outperforms a RISC processor.
> and have always toasted any CISC or CISC-to-RISC
> processor of a much higher processor rating.
That is misleading and, in fact, bordering on the level of a total lie. The benefits of RISC architectures are not performance. They're simplicity. This simplicity, in the past, sometimes had the benefit of increasing performance, but higher performance is not a rule in and of itself.
Saying that "pure RISC processors
In specfp_2000, the lowest frequency Pentium 4 scores a 516, while the highest frequency UltraSPARC III scores a 482. The slowest Pentium 4 is 7.1% faster than the fastest USPARCIII.
In specint_2000, the slowest P4 gets a 490, while the fastest Sun processor gets a 467. Here, the wimpiest current generation Intel processor is 4.9% faster than the best thing Sun can offer.
These above factors keep in mind that the Sun chips are *specifically* architected to achieve the highest performance possible, pretty much regardless of cost. They are full-on server chips. The Intel Pentium 4 series are designed with cost factors in mind. The Pentium 4 cannot be a three thousand dollar behemoth due to its target market (actually, the 750MHz USPARCIII processor module costs about $7k on Sun's website). So the USPARCIII can have the benefit of loads of added performance enhancing features while the Netburst (P4) architecture has to cut corners at every step.
the UltraSPARC III outperforms the Pentium 4 on a clock for clock basis. Of course, the original Pentium outperforms the Pentium 4 on a clock for clock basis on many benchmarks, too. This means nothing. It is merely reflective of different design strategies. I can easily point out the fact that the Pentium 4 offers higher performance per watt or higher performance per number of integer ALUs. But, like "performance per megahertz", those are also stupid measurements.
There is nothing out there which would cause me to believe that an x86 processor made with the design strategy of the UltraSPARC III ("we're gonna sell this for thousands of dollars, so throw in the kitchen sink, too!") would not outperform the UltraSPARC III at like frequency. Well, except if the the fp instructions on the USIII are three operand, but that's a special case. ^_^
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
Different architecture; the blade 100 uses 500MHz US2i chips, these are US3. They're unlikely to release a blade 100 with these chips in the near future. Longer term, I'd imagine a successor to the Ultra 5 type systems will be forthcoming at some point in the next 6 months or so, but it would almost certainly be more expensive.
Is this a good idea though? I mean, using one of today's compilers, ported to a IA64/Itanium architecture, a compiled program might run very slowly, since today's compilers probably let a bit of the optimization (within reason) up to the CPU. This would also mean that it may be a little while until some quality IA64 compilers are released. Or am I misinformed?
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
With the same switch, world peace will come, britney spears will have some talent and just maybe, code redworm will stop being a "threat". Ok ok.. I went overboard witht he britney spears thing, sorry ;)
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I don't know what APPLICATIONS you people are running but it seems all you are comparing are SPEC marks. We run Cadence Verilog and Synopsys synthesis on our Dell PIII 1Ghz machines and they blow the frigging doors of all of our SPARC's. For IC design applications at least 64Bit vs 32 Bit is a non issues as most of the apps are not compiled for 64bits. Performance is mostly just CPU clock speed so a 1Ghz PIII runs at just over 2x a Sun Ultra 450. Given that there is about a 3-4x difference in cost and about a 2x performance bonus you get about a 6x-8x cost/performance benifit. I'll take Intel machines all day long. Sun better wake up or they are going to lose the CAD market. Course, I don't think they really care about that one anyway.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
And comparision with _just_ a P4 isn't going to be much of a believable benchmark.
Although they're supposed to compete with Intel's Itanium chips, they only run at 900MHz ... for now.
Just becaue it runs "only" at 900mhz doesn't mean anything compared to an Itanium running at a higher clock speed. There are many more factures like pipelines, cache, and over all archetecture. A 900mhz sparc could beat an Itanium at a higher clock speed just like Athlons and PIIIs can beat P4s in certain benchmarks while running at lower clockspeeds. (not saying it will or will not, but you can't discount one processor based only on clock.)
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They make all of Sun's UltraSparc chips, and also manufacture other, more esoteric things - like dual core chips (DSP and ARM, known as OMAP).
All in all, TI is much, much more than calculators.
Windows is bloated because MS piles feature onto feature. The features don't work together, so there's a lot of implementation redundancy. If something goes wrong, a kludgy fix is added, making things worse. Everything gets totally redesigned every 6 months, so there's a lot of backward-compatibility support -- more implementation redundancy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Itanium a CISC-based processor while the sparc is a RISC-based processor. Even at 900MHz, it should outperform most CISC-based processors. Or should I stop posting at 8AM?
Actually, it's using UltraSparc IIe chips. It's basically a USIIi with the bus interface from a III (based on conversation with a Sun engineer). It was done as an experiment to get the front side bus right, probably for the IIIi, and they figured out that it was better than the IIi, used it in the Blade 100, the X1, and IIRC the T1.
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I agree, but it's infuriating to see Intel's chips and architecture trashed in comparison to Sun's based mostly on problems with the Windows OS. Yes, Sun's stuff is far superior, but Intel's, while not elegant, is pretty damned fast.
I would not think of running any of their newer bloaty code on a 486.
That's okay because it's not an option. Their setup for ME tests to verify that you have AT LEAST a 150mhz Pentium. Anything less and it refuses to install (there is a secret switch to skip that test).
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.
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.
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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...
It blows any of the pentium-based machines we have here out of the water.
-fialar
wow, someone badmouths a 900 mhz chip from sun being competition for the Itaniums (which, i read somewhere, were only running at 800 at this point...), and all of a sudden the "it's the pipeline, stupid" and "there's more than just megahertz" people come out of the woodwork.
i'll have to remember this when the next G4 vs Pentium4 debate comes up...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
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
How in a civilised society can we sit back and let this apocolypse happen? I say its time to end this now. Boycott processors. Save the instructions
Attempting to measure how fast a computer can go by its CPU's clock speed is tantamount to measuring how fast a car can go by its engine's horsepower. There are many more factors at play here.
Let's start with the whole RISC vs. CISC thing. Everyone knows that RISC is more efficient; the only thing that has kept CISC alive this long is backwards compatibility with the Wintel juggernaut. You develop a lean, efficient instruction set, then you write compiler back ends that take advantage of it.
Also keep in mind that Sun's motherboard designs are true performers. The path between the CPU, memory, and bus are designed to move data around in ways that just aren't possible with Intel.
Did you know that SPARC is more or less an "open" CPU design? It was designed to be a multi-vendor instruction set, one that would be 'common' without having one vendor calling all the shots. Read www.sparc.org for more details.
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And it doesn't enable the Internet either.
I'm a little surprised a technical web site would fall for the pure marketing hype. Next we're going to have an article complaining that the Ultra SPARC IIIs run only at 900 MHz and can't play the new space cadet game. That is a fun game it wasnt free but it was worth the money.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
There was something linked from solaris central about how the Ultra III was for massively multi-processor machines, not workstations. The Ultra IIIi will be the workstation processor clocking in(I think) at well over 1GHz. I'd provide the link, but I can't remember it.
-blah
The following sentence is TRUE. The previous sentence is FALSE.
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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.
Alternatively, read this.
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.
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(Preview looked good... what's going on there?)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
18 comments in and somebody caught that. Bugs the hell out of me when I see that in a chip review. Maybe someone will invent a 3ghz chip next week that uses 4 t states for every internal cycle (read 750mhz). I'll bet the press would hype it up and the investors would pour in the money, and we'd all be rich before we had to get it out of the fab... hold that thought
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.
I also noticed (over the past few years) that Sun has been leaning on the UltraII since like 1999.
:)
Back then they were way ahead of the game, since Intel/AMD were doing about a quarter their current clock speed, while Sun was doing about half.
I wonder what happened