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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?)
Won't somebody PLEASE think of the child processes?!?!
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"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
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.
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."
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?
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.
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?
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
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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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.
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.
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.