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Is Sun's Niagara Server Viagra?
argonaut writes "Ace's Hardware has an in-depth article on Niagara -- Sun's upcoming parallel server processor with 8 cores and 4 threads each. The article discusses the chip's radical architecture and what kind of performance can be expected from it in traditionally thread-heavy server applications like web hosting, databases, and other multi-user applications. Given the recent cancellation of the UltraSPARC V, it seems this is going to be Sun's new direction for its in-house CPU design efforts. Furthermore, both Intel and IBM are working on other highly parallel processors and AMD is expected to eventually introduce a dual-core Opteron. So, will more threads prop up Sun's performance?"
Is Sun's Niagara Server Viagra?
Best. Title. Ever.
To the might of IBM's Power CPU!
Not sure, but many threads here will discuss.
...what the hell? Sun is producing servers optimized to send spam now? What does it mean?!
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
8 cores and 4 threads each
I am getting a boner so it must be. If it runs Linux, I will bust a nut right here.
lets see your spam filter stop that one
It hardens your old server? My server is still pretty new, so I guess it doesn't need it.
" Sun's upcoming parallel server processor with 8 cores and 4 threads each."
Without warning, underwear tents pop up all over the country.
"Derp de derp."
Good thing I didn't receive an e-mail about this story in my e-mail box or it would have been nuked as spam.
Seriously though, why did the author have to use the term Viagra to simple mean 'performance boost'?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
not these, probably far too expensive.
but a cluster of AMD64FX's... mmmmmmmmm...
works better than Viagra?
gnaa wuz here looooool
Now that Billy G and Scotty are buds, maybe they can send down some CPU fluffers from Redmond. After all, Microsoft specializes in keeping it up. Or so they say...
The obvious answer: Sure it will. Assuming the ability to have them will in fact be used by the software running on the thing - which may still take a while.
Viagra is 'posed to make your one thing big and strong. Niagra is all about slicing and dicing one big thing into multiple threads. The mental image makes my knees ache...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
"So, will more threads prop up Sun's performance?" It seems to me that threads are more likely to hold something up in a suspended hanging manner, rather than prop in a pit pony wooden beam type fashion.
AMD is expected to eventually introduce a dual-core Opteron
If Opteron rhymed with Levitra, I could make a pretty funny joke here...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Its sounds more like that stuff that lasts all weekend!
I'm there.
(I figured that was going to happen 9 months ago when the 8-way systems weren't coming out... just waiting for the inevitable)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It's the same thing that's been happening for the last decade. As x86 slowly creeps in on Sun/IBM/Whatever's market, they have to come up with something "bigger".
Right now, the Opteron, with embedded memory controller and gobs of I/O, has really entered what was previously a niche market that Sun made very nice profits from.
So, now that particular cash-cow has fallen to the ravages of commodity parts, they're moving their sites even higher. Sun's never been the company to make $5 profit on each of 50 million computers, they'd much rather make $300,000 each on 1,000 computers.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Any advances Sun may have in CPU performance will be greatly outweighed by two major engineering design flaws they've gotten themselves in to:
1. overall system performance of their partitionable systems (i.e. the ones people will pay a premium for over low-end systems where Linux on Intel/AMD is killing them) is severely hampered by their 150MHz (Mhz!) backplane. Sun views this as a plus because it allows customers to run boards with differenc CPU speeds (e.g. a 750MHz board (5x backplane speed) and a 900MHz board (6x backplane speed)). So, board to board thruput suffers and overall scalability is reduced.
2. Their desire for greater hardware isolation between domains, down to only a 2 or 4 CPU board with whatever memory happens to be installed on those boards, severely limits the flexibility in providing workload management between logical servers (domains), as well as less flexibility to create / deploy fewer, smaller servers. IBM's LPAR architecture, and HP's VPARs, are kicking Sun's ASS!
I clicked on that link with trepidation, expecting to be goatse'd. Instead I got furry pr0n!
especially for server software that threads.
I'm especially intrigued on how this will
work with the Java NIO (new IO) libraries,
which handle pooled selectable IO channels.
Niagra and Java NIO together looks like
a really fast way to do mass serving...
Can anyone comment on threads sharing IO?
I hope that they've made some vast improvements or they're gonna have some serious issues feeding that beast. Systems now, even the Opteron which is among the better mem controllers around for a commodity processor, still have issues with wait states. Uberthreading it and dumping more cores on the chip will only make the situation worse unless they do a serious upgrade of the memory controller.
If they do not, why pay bazillion bucks for a processor that is idle for most of the time?
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
If the processor runs for more than 4 hours continuously or if I have a heart condition?
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
If your server stays up for longer than 4 hours at a time, seek emergency medical attention!
No matter how impressive the architecture happens to be, it will be evaluated by comparing it with a rack of P4's.
How many Power server systems does IBM ship compared with x86 systems?
Revenue per system might be better for high end systems, but the volume - the market size - is just not growing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The over/under for the number of bad Viagra jokes that will be posted to this discussion is 184.5.
I thought the server was just female.
So then it needs Niagara...
you know, to make them wet...
bada boom...
If Sun doesn't cancel this one, it could put them back on the map for server & enterprise-class computing. Low power, awesome multi-threading capabilities, and software that could only be described as "bad-ass" (The 3D Desktop should be out by then) will give Sun a huge edge over everyone that would take years to catch up.
But that's a big "if."
We can do better!
Pedantic Politicians Propose Ponderous Pirate Prison Penalties Rejected
Apparently, Slashdot isn't going to cover that bill that's currently in the Judiciary Committee which would give prison penalties for merely having enough copyrighted files shared.
Right now, they have to prove that you're doing it to get copyrighted files in return (NET Act), or they don't get to send you to prison, pretty much (because you're not doing it for financial gain, and the NET Act is the thing that defined exchange of copyrighted works as "financial gain"). But IANAL, so don't take my word for it, read the current copyright laws for yourself. Beware, USC 17 is looooooooooonnnnng.....
Viagra only works where the sun doesn't shine!
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The world is going to end if we ever give a computer viagra...I mean, it almost ended when we gave it to my grandpa...
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
I'm not sure jokes about unnatural sexual stimulents belong on a site dedicated to serious technical discussion, especially given that many of the participants are obviously minors. It doesn't present a good face to the public. Not very "family oriented" so to speak.
I hope the editors will exercise more restraint in their titles in the future. This sort of toilet humor is what led to the demise of Kuro5hin.
You can never be TOO hard, can you?
When can we expect the "Sun is dead" threads to reach the frequency of the "Apple is dead" threads? I await that day with great anticipation.
Not to destroy the lovely mental image in this thread. Well, here is the story, Sun is working on Niagra and the Rock. The Rock would combine the single-threaded approach of the UltraSparc product line with the multithreaded architecture of the Niagra processor ... check out the complete atricle
Yes, you're right. Except, of course, that the price to performance ratio of the X86 platform remains unmatched; X86-64 has removed some of the limitations of this platform; limitations that made it unsuitable for the high end, and now Intel has been forced to follow. I fear for Sun's long-term future. on the long run, value for money always wins in business. Or so I think.
The Cell processor follows the same design idea, if not more radical. Sony has cross licensed it to IBM and Toshiba. Toshiba is already planning on using Cell in high end processing.
The big question is if bandwidth constraints will choke these massively parallel superscalar processors.
Sun might want to sprinkle "Niagra" in its meta tags then.
The faster powerbooks mentioned a few articles ago, now those give me wood. In fact, I think I'll go read that story some more. Oh yeah... Ooh yeah!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
well if its so hard it shatter like ice that could be bad, rite?
This actually brings up something that I have been thinking about recently, what classifies something as commodity hardware. It's not as if an opteron box can be had for a tremendously low price, HP's quad processor opteron box starts at approx $20K. I don't really consider that "commodity". Compare that to a quad Xeon box for $26K. And finally compare that to a quad box from sun, for approx $34K. None of those are what I would consider commodity. So what is commodity pricing?
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
As their staggering losses continue to mount, I believe its pretty well proven that Sun doesn't belong in the processor design business any longer. They simply can't achieve the volume required to support the massive R&D investments required. Even nifty tech as described, the majority of business applications don't care what processor is running underneath - its all a matter of price/performance. Sun isn't going to win price/performance against intel and AMD.
Now all we need is a simple to learn language built to be compiled for threaded servers, and we're all set!
c l i c k here
babble james tycoon motherfucker nabob carlin reilly bubblehead chomsky allergy morning comment plastic bellybutton bookmark gate askslashdot Produce diplopod digress superheterodyne derriere whiskery Antithetical dovekie anthropic unshaped cresol perfectly Pothook slaveholder unzip hotbox athodyd occur verderer Bilander Dacron imprecate bulbar costmary sciolism coco Refusal sclerous unequal missal erratic redroot monotypic
sulli
RTFJ.
So, will more threads prop up Sun's performance?"
More is ALWAYS better. That's the American way!
Speaking of viagra, a shameless attempt at off-topic karma whoring: check out what happened when Macromedia asked Matt Stone and Trey Parker to come up with some content for them, i just wish i could have seen their faces when they watched this: here and here (free registration needed :\)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
MOD THIS PARENT UP.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Niagara might have on-chip Ethernet controllers as well as an on-chip TCP/IP Offload Engine. For network intensive applications this could help performance in several ways. Firstly communication between the Ethernet controllers and the CPUs would be internal to the chip, and would not require using system bandwidth. With on-chip buffers, even I/O buffers in main memory could possibly be eliminated (or at least reduced) which would help reduce the burden on main memory bandwidth, as well as improving latency. Niagara also seems to have built-in SSL acceleration, which helps reduce CPU load and improve overall performance. It would be interesting if Niagara has hardware GZIP acceleration too, as dynamically compressing HTML pages for browsers which say they support it can achieve 10:1 to 20:1 compression ratios.
(excerpt from the article)
ah, the smell of a new computer . ..works better than Viagra?
......nine hours later at the crack of dawn.
"Honey, I need to open this box from Alienware first."
"Honey, I'm done playing counterstrike. We can go to bed now."
"Yeah right. I need to get to work."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
FYI, the server is using a single 500MHz UltraSparc IIe CPU...
Intel is working on longer pipelines for their fat-core architecture, at the cost of more heat.
A great number of people use sparcs to run Oracle databases.
Current Oracle licensing schemes require that clients pay PER CPU CORE, for multi core processors. This screws anyone that uses Sun boxes, because the cores are US2 based. So the Oracle client has to pay heaps of cash to use, effectively, a 5 year old processor design. In addition, Oracle licensing requires that if your server has the capacity to hold more than 4 processors (eg cores) thes you have to pay the "enterprise" rates.
So in conclusion, the price of Oracle on a 2 cpu Xeon, AMD, or Ultra sparc 3 is about $6000. The price for Oracle on a 2 cpu Niagra (8 cores each) will be $320,000. Only an idiot will use this cpu (or this database). Since a lot of companies have a huge investment in Oracle, they will have no choice but to switch to x86 hardware. Sun is going to kill themselves with this design, despite the fact that the design, in itself, will greatly improve the throughput of their servers.
Oracle licensing is heavily slanted toward intel arcitecture, they have always penalized people for using risc based processors.
It's the same thing that's been happening for the last decade. As x86 slowly creeps in on Sun/IBM/Whatever's market, they have to come up with something "bigger".
This is not bigger. Taken to the extreme, this is like if Commodore was still in business and tried to sell computers with 2^32 6502 procs.
Look at the chart in the article to see how desperate Sun is:
They admit that existing Opterons Xeons not only kick the ass of their newest, existing architecture for a single thread, they also concede that even their not-existant future proc won't even be faster for single threaded apps.
Ok, you say, but it is faster for multithreaded apps. The only problem with that is that I bet that a recent multiproc Opteron/Xeon will give the future Sun architecture a run for its money.
And IBM/Intel won't have any problems building multicore procs, if they want. They just don't need to, at the moment.
IOW, looking at this chart one might ask himself why tSun even tries to build processors nowadays.
Kinda' puts a whole new meaning to the word "uptime", now doesn't it?
The real litigious bastards...
You're looking at it from the wrong end; the consumer end. Look at it from Sun's end and you may see it a bit differently. Since there is a comparable "commodity" system on the market, Sun would need to drop the price they charge to compete with the commodity system (without changing thier product strategy). Using your prices that would equate to a loss of profits:
$34,000 - $20,000 = $14,000
That's $14,000 that they would lose in profits if they were to compete by matching the price of the commodity system. Depending on the actual costs of making that system, this sort of sacrifice in profits may be very unreasonable for them.
The "commodity" bit merely means that there's a fair number of players in this market for a product competing mostly based on price. It does not necessarily mean that you're going to get your high preformance computer for the same price as your desktop PC.
Incidentaly they've been on and on about "commodities" and all that for years. What about their Niagara chip? I 've read the article and it hints that the chip will be fitted not only with processor cores but also with a tcp offload engine and crypto accell circuits. Plus the chip will be substantialy more energy efficient than its x86 counterparts. So you have a chip that does more things on its own, and consumes less energy. More integration could possibly mean commodisation. If these things require less electricity they could even produce laptops and tablets which could have their desktop products integrated.
I think that they no longer consider selling their hardware at high prices a valid option, they would rather go for mass markets like their desktop linux offering etc.
And one thing more, in my experience Sun's products were always high quality both in terms of engineering and in terms of craftsmanship. Unfortunately, we are living at an age where it is preferable to outsource your needs in the other side of the world just to shave off a few dollars/euros, no matter what happens to the quality of the product you deliver. It is not strange that Sun has these difficulties today, because they've always went for unmatched quality instead of sheer numbers. Now they are forced to change and move all the way around. Hope they make it, to me they are yet another choice and having many choices is good!..
...some old businessman throwing a computer thru a tire swing.
...a brothel.
...would run Oracle on a new Sun box anymore. Everybody in the Oracle-on-big-iron world knows that *the* Unix platform upon which to run Oracle is IBM's top-end RS6000 machines. The stability is rock solid, the bang for the buck is better, and IBM's hardware and O/S support network is better too... once you get past the Indian call center. That plus IBM's LPAR technology on these boxes is both a developer's and a sysadmin's wet dream.
...seeing as Java 3D (what I expect they were using) probably just hooks into native opengl code which in turn can mostly run on low-end current generation GPU I can think of nothing better than to put those clock cycles to. Think about it, when you're playing games your video card is normally maxed out, but when you're working in openoffice or the like all your gpu is 2d work, why not leverage the 3d accelerations as they wouldn't otherwise be used?
I am NaN
They hardly sell single processor systems anyway ... people interested in their types of servers and HPC are not interested in tasks without plenty of parallelism.
Cell is designed for massive parallelism ... but it is unlikely to be heavily based on multithreading. More aimed at stream type processing, with very predictable memory access patterns.
If it did, I would be getting more spam from Dell.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
It's very interesting to think about who these Niagara based servers are going to be targeted for. The nifty IOE feature and integrated ethernet controller seems to guarantee they should be great for telecom purposes. Of course that's a cursed market that Sun is already king of. Niagara based server seem destined to go head-to-head with dual-processor Xeons and Opterons. IT groups building web server farms or clustered databases will have a new option to consider. Either go with cheaper, lower performance Xeons and Opterons running Linux or with fewer, but more expensive Sun Niagaras running Solaris. It's an interesting proposition, and seems like Sun's first real attempt to compete on price/performance. The real x-factor is AMD. If they can really break into the server market, then the Opteron could offer as much performance as the Niagara but at the same (or lower) price as a Xeon.
It's ironic to see how positions have changed. Intel and AMD are developing multi-core CPUs for use in 4+ way systems, while Sun develops a CPU that is SMP incompatible. Of course Sun is also working on Rock, and hoping it can compete with a Xeon as a single cpu, while still scaling for 100 CPU Infernos (or whatever they are going to call them.)
The Niagara processor and its successor, Rock, are based almost entirely on the Hydra processor that Professor Kunle Olukotun developed at Stanford University. He co-founded the company, Afara Websystems, that Sun Microsystems purchased. If you want to know how Niagara works, just check out the Hydra processor.
The reason that Sun Microsystems abandoned the UltraSPARC V and successors is that the design teams who developed the UltraSPARC processors after the UltraSPARC II were just horrible. Normally, when engineers develop the microarchitecture and eventually the Verilog model of the chip, a documentation engineer documents all aspects of the chip. In the case of Sun Microsystems, there was no documentation engineer. Ultimately, on the very day that Sun released its processor to the market, no documentation existed.
Even Sun's own engineers did not have the documentation to develop the boards that would accept an UltraSPARC processor. The whole experience is incredibly stupid but true. Most engineers on the processor teams are Indians or Taiwanese, and they just "do not do documentation". Various Linux gurus complained about the lack of documentation needed to port Linux to the latest version of the UltraSPARC. Sun would have loved to produce the documentation if it existed. Unfortunately, it just did not exist.
UltraSPARC V had the same problem. The whole design process for the UltraSPARC V was a mess, and canceling the project fixed the mess.
Sun does not have the engineers with the skills to build a fat-core processor. So, Sun moved to thin-core processors like Niagara. They are easier to build and to document. They simply matched Sun's skill set, which is derived mostly from foreigners.
Unfortunately, for Sun, what is easy for Sun to design and build is also very easy for IBM and HP to design and build. If you IBM and HP engineers are reading this article, you are in luck. Just check out the Hydra processor, and you will know the 80% of microarchitecture of the Niagara processor. Fortunately, for you guys, building a Hydra-based processor that executes the Power instruction set architecture (ISA) or the HP ISA is much easier than building a processor that executes the SPARC ISA. Those damned 128-register register windows diminish the number of cores that can be squeezed onto the die.
I would like nothing more than to see Sun's processor department setting by 2008. Sun should not be in the business of designing processors. The UltraSPARC-III fiasco should have been a big clue.
If Sun were purely a software house, we'd have a chance of making a profit.
The only way I can see them staying alive is to find a sucker to dump SPARC on and embrace Opteron. If they tie their future to AMD's then AMD might decide to keep their promises. I do not thing it would be very wise to make the same bet on intel. I'm not sure if Solaris has a future but I'm pretty sure that if SPARC does, it won't be Sun driving.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
those servers do give me a hard-on
But will your Sun server need microsoft support and licensing soon?
I generally call it "commodity" if you can go out, buy the parts from different places, and put it together yourself. Although in the quad-cpu market you *usually* have to get the motherboard and case together, it still qualifies.
I have a quad-Xeon (P3) at the office, I bought the mobo/case from SuperMicro, and the other parts from various distributors. Sure, the price was around $15K by the time I got all of the doo-dads (10-disk RAID array...), but it was still all "commodity" hardware to me.
Now, you *might* be able to buy a Sun mobo/case by itself and do the same thing, but I had various choices as to manufacturers for the quad-Xeon. With Sun, well, you have Sun. : )
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Well, if it's west, then that's the direction the Sun will go. And even if they go under sometime, we can trust they'll be back the next day.
It's not the same as 5-10 years ago, the haydays when if you were serious you needed Sun, HPUX, SGI, or AIX boxes for hardware speed and quality and (very important) for availability of serious software. It very much so looks like the niche Sun is in is shrinking. Sun better have an answer to cluster computing with commodity hardware. A lot of heavy applications do very well on a cluster. IBM saw it coming and seems to be right on it, reshaping itself, HP has become very active with clusters, and SGI is building huge NUMA boxes, but Sun, what is their angle?
A Supermicro-based 1U Dual Xeon PCI-X 2x1Gb lan box with 2GB ECC RAM is less than $2k (and it can go to 8GB RAM if you need more than 2GB). For $34K, you can load up 15 of those on a half-rack, add a couple of UPS-es and a quality switch. That $34K box better have some serious performance to beat a 'commodity' cluster.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
So if one of these servers should happen to go down, would one say that "Niagara falls?"
Oh, the redundancy.
Dear Slashbot, Sun doesn't own SPARC.
Thanks,
The Clue Bat
A quad V440 with 16Gb would come in at well under 19K from Sun... It's very well priced.
Ok, put on the sun glasses since you have been blinded by the Sun, and, cannot see the complete picture. Sun is not the only CPU vendor that has this restriction on CPU licensing. Intel's Hyperthreading, also, requires multiple licenses per CPU, as does, IBM on their latest CPU.
I thought that this new technology has great promise because it really is cool stuff--A massive server on a sinlge CPU die, with the throughput to back it up. I wish I did not have to sift through all the "Sun is Dead" troll BS that obviously comes from folks that just don't know what they are talking about. There should be plenty of techncical discussion befitting the topic. How will Intel address saturating a 10 Gb Ethernet? Sun has done it. And, is available today. There are many technical gems that Sun did invent and OWNS. Sun is continuing inventing these gems, as presented in this news post. It is always darkest before the dawn. Betta buy some shades!
Any genuine Sun employee can go to sunweb and search for "UltraSPARC" and "Manual" and find themselves on the technical docs page for the processor group. There they will find manuals and datasheets for the UltraSPARC III and even the brand-new UltraSPARC IV.
Poster doesn't seem to care much for people who don't look like him (I'm guessing "him" -- very few women seem to have this kind of paranoia), and is plugging in factoids such as the Afara acquisition for credability.
A real nice touch is the tinfoil hat explanation for why Sun isn't giving unrestricted access to their processor docs: there aren't any! Because of Indians and Taiwanese! So no one can build Ultra III systems -- not even Sun engineers! Apparently all the Ultra III (and now IV) systems Sun has been shipping for the last few years are a carefully orchestrated charade, one even more sophisticated than the whole moon landing hoax.
They simply matched Sun's skill set, which is derived mostly from foreigners.
I have a hard time understanding how one's skill set is determined by their nationality. Ability to communicate in English, perhaps. But then again, I would say the same about any Bay Area born engineer that moves to Bangalore and has to communicate part time in Hindi.
In any case, I think there's a major difference between one's ability to write prose or design a chip. Communication among team members is crucial, of course. But if they're all of a similar nationality & language, as you say, that wouldn't be a problem now, would it?
-Stu