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."

Comments

Re:Stop the slaughter

[sharkey]

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

Re:Different Architecture

[aheitner]

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)

MHz to MHZ

[shokk]

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

Traffic Jam

[beanerspace]

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.

Re:UltraSPARC chips Vs Intel

[larien]

People often say things like that, but my experience is that you may get something like a 50% boost in an equivalent clock speed USII chip.

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...

Re:Stop the slaughter

[coreman]

Did they get the execution speed up by going with Texas Instruments?

Re:RISC/CISC

[color of static]

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.

Slight nit to pick...

[emil]

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.