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Jonathan Schwartz Shows 32-Way UltraSPARC Chip

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the much-that-is-hidden dept.

Megaslow writes "The latest entry in Jonathan Schwartz's blog has pictures of Sun's Project Niagra chip, with 8 cores * 4 threads per core for a 32-way computer on single chip. He also shows what looks to be a test rig reportedly already up and running Solaris 10."

54 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by lewp · · Score: 4, Funny

    You know what I'd do if I had one of these?

    Two chicks, man.

    --
    Game... blouses.
  2. solaris fan by BoldAC · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Okay, I am a solaris/sun fan boy. But this sounds like it was crafted by a professional commerical writer...

    Ahhh... to be 38 and be this guy. President of Sun at 38 years old... what a life.


    This is the silicon for our Project Niagara chip: 8 cores * 4 threads per core = a 32-way computer. On a chip.
    And did I mention we have silicon, and not just a JPEG file?
    And I saved the best for last. Are you ready?
    It's already running Solaris. A volume OS that eats threads for lunch, on the world's most advanced massively parallelized silicon.
    That's not just a box.
    That's what we call a system. A system built for internet workloads. Not for the expedience of a press release. And a system that gives customers yet more choice, rather than taking choice away.
    (And before you ask, yes, we are planning a nicer box when we ship :)

    These guys deserve to Microsoft level of success...

    Several of sun gurus have given us suggestions and hints at solaris section of our site. Without their early input and links from within the sun website, we would have never been as successful.

    These guys are trying to do things big and correctly.

    1. Re:solaris fan by AlexTheBeast · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It does read like a commerical... ... a commerical against IBM.


      I'm watching with amusement as IBM prepares to stub its toe with their new, curiously named "OpenPower" low-end boxes.

      Now, I will freely admit I am entirely confused by what they're doing. Why on earth would you ship a proprietary computer that doesn't run your own operating system (AIX)? If I were trying to freak out my installed base, that's exactly what I'd do.

      These guys are attacking IBM (and linux?) directly. The first part of his blog is a calculated attack against IBM--step by step he breaks down IBM's strategy. Just when you are wondering why you ever thought about using IBM, he introduces his new baby. He must have spent hours crafting this blog post.

      Yes, it's a commerical.

      I just can't believe that blog posts are this important now. I remember when we would just finger the inside guys we knew to see the plan. Now, it's been turned around into a commerical like everything else.

    2. Re:solaris fan by jeif1k · · Score: 2, Insightful

      These guys are trying to do things big and correctly.

      I think "big" and "correctly" are themselves contradictions in terms these days. Solaris is bloated, Java is bloated, and now they are producing a bloated CPU chip.

      None of this will stop commodity hardware and open source from kicking Sun's butt and driving them out of business, because ultimately, people don't want "big", they want manageable and cost-effective. And that Sun isn't delivering anymore.

      Ahhh... to be 38 and be this guy. President of Sun at 38 years old... what a life.

      I'm sure he is well paid, but so are lots of other jobs. Other than that, I would imagine his job is causing him ulcers because deep down, he must know that his company is in deep trouble.

    3. Re:solaris fan by Quixote · · Score: 4, Funny
      A system built for internet workloads

      ... and slashdotted already ;-)

      Back to the drawing board again, eh, Jonathan?

    4. Re:solaris fan by BoldAC · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think "big" and "correctly" are themselves contradictions in terms these days. Solaris is bloated, Java is bloated, and now they are producing a bloated CPU chip.

      As much as I love sun, it's hard to argue with your points. Java and Sun both have some bloat... agreed. Even most main stream linux distros are bloated compared to a few years ago. However, it's hard for me to understand how a chip can have bloat? The bigger and faster and more the chip does, the better! Right?

      People a few years ago were complaining because programs were too big. People don't really complain about this anymore because hard drive space has gotten so cheap. Now we usually complain about bloat for other reasons... mainly speed, usability and security.

      Will cheaper, faster, bigger, and better chips help decrease this problem? Maybe, maybe not. But I don't know how it could hurt.

    5. Re:solaris fan by jeif1k · · Score: 3, Interesting

      However, it's hard for me to understand how a chip can have bloat? The bigger and faster and more the chip does, the better! Right?

      One of the biggest bottlenecks in computers is the interface between the CPU and memory. It makes little sense to make the CPU so fast that it requires data faster than the memory system can provide it. So, 32-way CPU may, in fact, not be much faster than a single or dual core CPU when you build a real computer running real applications around it. Even if it turns out to be significantly faster, there may be other, simpler, cheaper ways of achieving the same speedup.

      Based on the presentation in the blog, Niagara sounds just like more of Sun's "bigger is better" attitude, as opposed to sound cost/benefit tradeoffs. Keep in mind that the blog brags about the fact that Niagara is "32-way", not that it were faster than the best PowerPC chip.

      Whether Sun's chip actually delivers good bang for the buck remains to be seen. I don't think any of Sun's recent machines have delivered good bang for the buck, so I won't be holding my breath (we used to be a big Sun customer but haven't bought any Sun hardware for several years now).

      Even most main stream linux distros are bloated compared to a few years ago.

      Linux distros, yes. The Linux kernel is still being kept fairly lean feature-wise relative to Solaris or NT (it just has lots of drivers and loadable add-ons).

  3. Re:Jonathan Schwartz by michael+path · · Score: 2, Funny

    Would that be like, the merging of 'haircut' and 'circuit'?

    I'll try.

    'HARE-kit'.

    How'd I do?

  4. Apparently Not Such a Powerful Chip After All by The+Other+White+Meat · · Score: 2, Funny

    So far, there have been like 8 posts on this article, and the article itself seems to have been slashdotted. If they have Four Processors per Poster, you'd think they could keep the page up...

    --

    --- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
  5. blergh by gustgr · · Score: 2, Funny

    BLOGS.sun.com

    enough said.

  6. Sounds Pretty Bitter by Apple+Acolyte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Schwartz's blog may not be representative of the general corporate attitude at Sun, but he comes across as bitter and even hostile. Perhaps he is just a passionate believer in his company's work, but his whiney tone smacks of unprofessionalism. I'm not particularly well versed on the continuing saga that is Sun, but should not product performance be speaking for itself? In any case, if they have achieved something noteworthy with this "32-way" chip, I hope they figure out a way to make it useful. This MPR Paper on the processor may be of interest to some.

    --
    Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
    1. Re:Sounds Pretty Bitter by rs79 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Schwartz's blog may not be representative of the general corporate attitude at Sun, but he comes across as bitter and even hostile.

      He's a programmer. You're lucky he cleaned up that well for a photo.

      Beware of smiling programmers.

      --
      Need Mercedes parts ?
    2. Re:Sounds Pretty Bitter by Animixer · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If a company could get by on "product perfomance speaking for itself", DEC would still be around and we'd all be running VMS on Alpha.

      --
      man tunefs | grep fish
    3. Re:Sounds Pretty Bitter by jamiethehutt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      but should not product performance be speaking for itself?

      It should, but as DEC and the Alpha show it doesn't.

  7. Hold on... by StevenHenderson · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Sun's Project Niagra chip, with 8 cores * 4 threads per core for a 32-way computer on single chip

    Doesn't mean a damn thing unless software is written to take advantage of it. Damn PC developers can't write software to take advantage of HT (with some exceptions, I know), but hopefully this chip's power can be realized fully.

    1. Re:Hold on... by ban · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Doesn't mean a damn thing unless software is written to take advantage of it. Damn PC developers can't write software to take advantage of HT (with some exceptions, I know), but hopefully this chip's power can be realized fully.

      Why is it that people keep stating that you have to write software that targets HT specifically? This is not true. Any multithreaded application will benefit from it. It is up to the OS to present you with the CPUs, real or virtual.

      Yes, there are specific issues with handover during tight spinloops et.c., but only people writing locking or timing code should have to deal with those issues. Not your average application programmer.

    2. Re:Hold on... by jarich · · Score: 2, Informative
      Why is it that people keep stating that you have to write software that targets HT specifically? This is not true. Any multithreaded application will benefit from it.

      This statement is true, but...

      HT or a 2nd CPU will get you somewhere between 10 and 20% boost on your software. It does this letting OS operations like disk IO, video, etc, run on the second "CPU".

      If you learn to write good threaded code, you can see nearly 100% speed increase per CPU. That's the difference.

      And just to turn this into a more interesting thread, I do with this Java. :) And yes, it scales nicely if you use it properly.

      Anyway, when people talk about how no one knows how to take advantage of HyperThreading or multiple CPU machines, this is what they are referring to. 10% boost versus 100% boost.

      --
      Agile Artisans
    3. Re:Hold on... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative
      SMP (of which HT is one implementation) is not magic. You do not have any more execution units than you had without SMT. The first thread to be scheduled gets to pick what execution units it wants to use. The second thread gets to pick from the left-overs (then the third and fourth threads on each core in this chip get a go in this example, although HT only supports 2 threads). This means that for each core, you have two non-uniform CPUs. Scheduling threads optimally on uniform CPUs is relatively easy. Scheduling on non-uniform CPUs is a whole lot harder. But wait, it gets worse - the capabilities of the second virtual CPU vary depending on what you're running on the first one. In order to get a significant benefit from SMT, you need a scheduling algorithm that takes all of this into account (I don't know of any that exist on paper, let alone in implementation).

      An alternative is to design your threads so that they will be using different parts of the chip (for example, run a floating point intensive thread and an integer intensive thread at the same time). This, however, will only work in very specific environments.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re:Hold on... by DarkMan · · Score: 3, Insightful
      You can't get a 100% speed boost with HT.

      HyperThreading presents a virtual CPU - there are the same number of compuational units in the core. The speed advantage from HT is that with threaded code, there is additional silicon to save the state of each thread.

      With the same number of execution units, however, you can't get better then optimal for a single non-HT CPU; once all the execution units are full, that's it, whether it's one thread or two.

      HT is a great boost for a threaded app where it is not CPU bound in general.

      On the other hand, a second CPU carries an aditional set of execution units; that means you can, in theory double the CPU output.

      Neither helps with the memory - cpu bandwidth issues, which can limit performance. Dual CPU can mitigate that with dual memory controllers (see, e.g. Opteron), but that has it's own complications.

      So, HT is a small step between dual CPU, and dual CPU.

      However, even the most optimistic benchmarks from Intel that I have ever seen quote a 30ish% speed increase with HT. I have never, ever, seen anyone claim that HT can give a 100% speed boost - can you reference that claim?

      I quote from
      http://www.intel.com/business/bss/products/hyper th reading/server/index.htm":

      While Hyper-Threading Technology will not provide the level of performance scaling achieved by adding a second processor, benchmark tests show some server applications can experience a 30 percent gain in performance.


  8. ultrasparc by GMail+Troll · · Score: 2, Insightful
    This is fairly impressive, althrough really with chips written in high level hardware description languages it probably isnt very difficult to just add more cores. I'd certainly like to see what the power and heat requirements are for this thing (forgive me if this is mentioned in the article, it appears to be slashdotted so I cant read it). I guess one of the advantages of the SPARC architecture is that the relative simplicity of the instruction set (compared to x86) makes it possible to do things like this.


    gmail invite

  9. /. article. But a 32 way processor? by tod_miller · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I can see these lovely ladies being applied to some serious film fx... I wonder what kind of advantages these systems would give to rendering houses, or is the cost of these for farming cpu power too high, and there is more bang for using Durons?

    I guess this differs based on each application and resource requirements.

    Still, nice.

    --
    #hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
    1. Re:/. article. But a 32 way processor? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      The entire chip shares a couple of floating point units, it's not a number cruncher.

    2. Re:/. article. But a 32 way processor? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      This isn't made for rendering, or for stuff that requires floating point power.

      Since the chip has 8 cores, each core is quite simple. This kind of chip is more suited for database and web servers, where there are lot of simultaneous requests, but fullfilling a single request is quite simple task.

      You can find more information about Niagara here.

  10. I'd be ALL SET FOREVER by gunnk · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'd be all set FOREVER if I could only get 20 of these! I mean...

    640 Processors should be enough for anyone! :-)

    --
    Life is short: void the warranty.
  11. And their blog server still gets slashdotted!!! by notany · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Apparently blogs.sun.com is very bad marketing.

    --
    Dyslexics have more fnu.
  12. Sun is doing what they do best by sofakingon · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Sun is back to doing what they do best, designing extremely reliable , high-performance hardware. I really do hope they can adapt their business model VERY soon. I know that the mission critical systems and workstations at my place of employment DONT use x86 hardware and/or M$ products- but then again there are how many people with Solaris experience and certifican VS the M$ crowd (myself included)? On the flip side, we don't need all of a 2 story building to house a classroom for MS training because everyone already knows Windows (in theory at least).

    Maybe the open sourcing of Solaris will help them pool their resources better and re-direct their efforts?

  13. What is Open? by peterdaly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does Johnathan not get it, or is he playing the FUD game? The IBM Open chip is not a chip without an OS. It runs linux...a commodity OS. That means two major things.

    1. People who run Linux on a different box may be more likley to upgrade to the Open chip since they won't have to take an OS change into account as well.

    2. People not happy with big blue can migrate to another vendor without having to take an OS change into account. That means less lock in.

    Sun doesn't get it. Or more likley they do, but don't want to help their customers figure it out.

    -Pete

    --
    Soccer Goal Plans
    1. Re:What is Open? by Mark+Round · · Score: 4, Informative

      2. People not happy with big blue can migrate to another vendor without having to take an OS change into account. That means less lock in.

      Well, not exactly. If they are running IBM's POWER processor, then they can't really move their applications to another vendor, as no-one but IBM "does" POWER. They could move to another platform and still run Linux (say, x86 for example), and manage to apply _most_ of their sysadmin experience - but any proprietry, binary-only applications running on that box would have to either be bought again or re-licensed. So there would be an OS change, even if it's only from one architecture to another.

      -Mark

    2. Re:What is Open? by Decaff · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because he must know that Sun is basically finished as a company

      Nice to know you have such predictive abilities.

      : their hardware is uninteresting and Solaris is uninteresting.

      I would have thought that their SMP hardware would be interesting to geeks - unlike the compromised NUMA architecture that lesser Unix boxes run.

      Solaris should definitely be of interest to anyone interested in UNIX or Linux - unless features such as partitioning and scalability are dull?

      The most annoying and dangerous thing about Schwartz is that he keeps trying to redefine the meaning of "open" and "open source" in order to get Sun's highly proprietary platforms and prducts (e.g., Java) to be more widely accepted.

      Java 'Highly proprietary'? Ah - I guess that is why the spec is published, and why GNU can implement Java; why Java is the most in-demand language for IT jobs, and why its so widely targetted on sourceforge.

      There is nothing proprietary about Java, only the name, which you must pass compatibility tests to use. Without these compatibility tests, Java would have fragmented years ago.

      (and, make no mistake: Sun has tighter legal ownership of Java than Microsoft has of any of their platforms)

      Evidence?

      Sun already extract a lot of revenue from Java - they use it as their language of preference when the provide software consultancy services (now a significant part of their revenue). There is also J2EE licencing, and J2ME services and partnering.

    3. Re:What is Open? by Daniel+Ellard · · Score: 4, Insightful
      1. People who run Linux on a different box may be more likley to upgrade to the Open chip since they won't have to take an OS change into account as well.



      Linux runs on Sparc, as does FreeBSD. There's no reason to think that these kernels will not be ported to take advantage of the Niagra architecture. If you don't like solaris, nobody is going to force you to use it (except maybe your customers, if that's what they like).



      2. People not happy with big blue can migrate to another vendor without having to take an OS change into account. That means less lock in.



      I call FUD on you. Doesn't "big blue" make the Z architecture, OS/390, System/36, etc., which are text-book examples of vendor lock-in? As in all other situations, you choose the system that works best for you. If vendor lock-in is fear for you, get Linux from IBM (or Sun, for that matter).
      On the other hand, if you need something that only System/36 or Windows or MacOS or Solaris provides, then you bite the bullet and buy that.


      --
      Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
    4. Re:What is Open? by Decaff · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are mistaken. Sun's SunFire systems are NUMA.

      You are right in this case, but many Sun systems (including earlier SunFire machines) are SMP.

      As far as scalability goes, Linux runs on "lesser" 512 CPU systems, with plans for 1024 and 2048. Solaris is at 144 CPUs. They're the cold, hard facts.

      Scalability has nothing to do with the number of processors. Just because you can place a Linux system on that number of CPUs does not mean that it will efficiently make use of them for general purpose use. The large CPU count Linux systems are often for very specialised numerical work where a coder puts in a lot of effort (using specialised libraries) to distribute algorithms. You may be able to use kernel services (such as I/O) from all of those processors, but that doesn't mean it will scale within the kernel (although, in these applications, it doesn't need to).

      On the other hand, high-processor count Solaris/Sparc systems are usually more general purpose business machines, running database engines, app servers, web services etc. These hammer the CPUs with unpredictable and varied requests.

      The 'I put my OS on more processors that you' argument is very misleading.

    5. Re:What is Open? by joib · · Score: 3, Insightful


      I would have thought that their SMP hardware would be interesting to geeks - unlike the compromised NUMA architecture that lesser Unix boxes run.

      As others have said, the current generation of big iron Suns (the Sun Fire) is NUMA. You can find details in

      Alan E. Charlesworth: The sun fireplane system interconnect, Proceedings of SC2001 (available online if you have an ACM subscription).

      While Suns combination of snooping and directory based cache coherency is neat, it nothing revolutionary or so, that other companies would somehow be unable to implement if they wanted to.

      If Sun tanks, the world will go on just fine without them.


      Solaris should definitely be of interest to anyone interested in UNIX or Linux - unless features such as partitioning and scalability are dull?

      For the vast majority of users who have no need for partitioning nor extreme scalability, yes those features are pretty dull. And those who need those features know that Sun isn't the only game in town.

      If Sun tanks, the world will go on just fine without them.

    6. Re:What is Open? by Decaff · · Score: 3, Funny

      Do you take me for an idiot? Scalability is exactly that. By definition.

      No offence intended! I have seen (and used) many systems where software was placed on large arrays of processors, but made poor use of them. Its like putting a go-kart on a 5-lane motorway.

  14. Not that great.. by jjeffrey · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It only helps if you have a very parallel application that is enormously heavier on CPU cycles than on disk or anything else - there aren't many like that.

    Also, I think it's quite funny that blogs.sun.com seems to have been slashdotted...

    1. Re:Not that great.. by mikael · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most of Sun's application software vendors (CAD/CAM/animation) were busy porting their applications over to multithreaded mode back in the mid 1990's.

      Even if an application isn't multithreaded, the window system may very well be. And you can always have all those background processes (clock, TCP/IP, X-server) running on different CPU's, leaving at least one CPU free to run your application without swapping/scheduling out memory.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    2. Re:Not that great.. by Daniel+Ellard · · Score: 2, Interesting
      It only helps if you have a very parallel application that is enormously heavier on CPU cycles than on disk or anything else - there aren't many like that.

      Too bad TFA is slashdotted... the point is not parallel applications, it's applications with lots of threads. If you're putting together a service nicely decomposes into lots of threads (i.e., lots of httpd's) then this is very nice -- lots of threads running side by side, no context switches...

      --
      Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
    3. Re:Not that great.. by mestlick · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Each of those 32 threads is not going to be very fast.

      These chips will not be used for databases or scientific computing where you would like high single thread performance.

      They will be used for web servers and the like, where you have lots of users hammering on one server.

  15. something for google? by kc_cyrus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Google's architecture might play well with this design with lots of processors in a dense package with relatively good power efficiency per processor.

  16. We're supposed to be impressed? by xyote · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sun has never explained or shown what this Throughput computing is all about. More multi-processors. Yeah, so? You need concurrency mechanisms to exploit it. Pthreads by itself isn't going to hack it. They won't scale up. Even if Sun has "parallelized" Solaris, it's in user space where most of the processing is done and where most of the problems will occur.

    1. Re:We're supposed to be impressed? by davecb · · Score: 2, Informative
      Yes, if you're a nerd (;-))

      The current problem in compuring is that memory speeds are going up far slower than processor speeds, causing huge cache-fill delays. Sun came up with a simple architecture to keep the processors running anyway, and it is compatable with multiprocessing and multithreading:

      1. Run decoder A until cache blocks on a read
      2. Clear ALU and switch to decoder & register file B
      3. Run B until cache blocks on a read...

      .. and so on for C-F. then go back to A. Put two ALUs and two sets of 8 decoder/register sets, so as to use the whole of the current memory interconnect bandwidth.

      Given this much raw compute power from the same size (and price-range) silicon, the marketplace will rapidly multi-thread or at least multi-instance their programs. They've already done the latter to run on Beowulf clusters, after all!

      --dave

      --
      davecb@spamcop.net
  17. Software licensing by Mark+Round · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What will be interesting is how the software market adjusts to these multi-core processors becoming more widespread and popular (particularly with dual-core Opteron on the way). They're going to have to rethink things a bit with regards per-processor licensing. From what I recall, Oracle (and many others) consider a dual-core processor two separate processors, and charge accordingly. Anyone running one of these chips would then get stung for a 8 (or possibly 32) processor license.

    Perhaps a better solution would be to adopt the approach taken by IDC (which Sun obviously seem quite happy to back) of counting processor sockets, instead of cores.

    Anyone know what other software companies are planning on doing with their per-processor licensing ?

    -Mark

    1. Re:Software licensing by qwijibo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Looking at processors like these, they're aimed at the server market. The people who can buy this hardware can afford the licenses. If one of these processors can compete with a 32 processor Sun Fire 12K in a functional sense, do you think Oracle is going to want less money? A count of "processors" presented to the system is as good a way of scaling licenses as any other in the server market.

      Licensing probably won't change until everyone has multi core processors. Even then, licensing per "computer" without counting processors is still viable for desktop applications. Licensing is just income. Nobody cares how they do it, they just want to make sure they get as much of it as they can.

  18. solaris 10 predictive self healing by sl4shd0rk · · Score: 4, Funny

    After upgrading the Sun server on our network to Solaris 10, all of a sudden the Exchange server stopped working, our Primary Domain Controller went tits up, and the W2K DHCP Server went offline. I've gotten six phone calls in the last 10 minutes from people calling to ask why their workstations say "Welcome to Looking Glass" when they log in. ;)

    --
    Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
  19. Re:Wow by Xpilot · · Score: 4, Funny

    It says "Niagra chip", not "Viagra chip".

    --
    "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
  20. That's just 31 more ways the machine can fail... by march · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's just 31 more ways the machine can fail... Have you noticed how the reliability of Sun's hardware has really fallen off in the past few years? I have an SS2 from '95 that is still runnnig (a seti@home client) and has not failed a single time from hardware (other than the initial Quantum disk going dead). At work, there is a hardware failure almost every day. Granted, we have a lot of Sun's, but still...

  21. Re:Jonathan Schwartz by spektr · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can someone say haircuit?

    This man clearly has no time to support his hair, because it is not part of his core business. Haircuts designed by an underpaid committee simply don't cut it. We suggest that he should open source his haircut using a GPL style license and let the community do all further development. ESR is already preparing a groundbreaking new paper named "The wig museum and the hairdresser's shop".

  22. Re:That's just 31 more ways the machine can fail.. by HalfFlat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But you have to remember, the Sparcstation 2 was pretty special. One of the best workstations produced ... ever.

    Sun may still have good server hardware -- it's been a while since I've had to deal with it -- but as far as workstations are concerned, I don't think they've ever matched what they achieved with the SS2, compared with the contemporary competition.

    And it even looked good.

  23. Not for PeeCees by turgid · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Doesn't mean a damn thing unless software is written to take advantage of it.

    This is a SPARC processor. It runs Solaris. The Solaris kernel is fully pre-emptively muti-threaded. Most of the large applications that you buy a big Solaris box to run are also highly mutlithreaded.

    The beauty of this design is that there is already a mature, stable and high-performance industry-standard OS for it (Solaris) along with thousands of applications.

    You could even probably run Linux on it if you wanted.

    --
    Stick Men
  24. C10K by cmaxx · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think they're particularly looking at things like the C10K problem (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html).

    The new Solaris 10 networking code reputedly pays a lot of attention to exploiting, and serving threads well, particularly hardware multithreading if it's available.

    If they could squeeze one of these and maybe 8GB+ of RAM into a 1U box or into their blade centre, then I think it'd do quite nicely for serving web.

    --
    ...an Englishman in London.
  25. Re:Wow by Mysticalfruit · · Score: 5, Funny

    When I first read the headline, I thought it said "Nigeria" not "Niagra" and all I could think of was what the boot messages would look like....

    I am of great luck that I have found you in my booting time of need. ...
    Before my father passed away he moved 32 MILLION BYTES of CACHE to a daughter board on the pci bus. I have contacted the pci controller, and explained your GRANT request. ...
    I need you to send me a copy of your PID, your UID, your address and your IRQ.

    --
    Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
  26. Has anyone noticed.... by thewiz · · Score: 2, Funny

    that the motherboard and CPU combo that he shows on his blog has no memory on it? Must be one of those magical motherboards to be running Solaris 10 with no memory.

    --
    If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
  27. Nice FUD by hkb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    His FUD rant against IBM was quite amusing, considering that he's an executive in a company who's released a series of curious, low-end "funny little boxes". JavaStation... Sun Rays... did anyone really buy, use, and keep using all that crap? No.

    I wonder if Microsoft taught Sun execs classes on speaking FUD as a part of the lawsuit settlement...

    Yet more hot air from a dying company mismanaging a great, outstanding product (Solaris), that's quickly being swallowed by Linux, Apple, *BSD, and NT, and is so... so out of touch with its customer base, or what's left of it.

    --
    /* Moderating all non-anonymous trolls up since 2004 */
  28. "That's what we call a system" by jackrd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If that's what they call a system, remind me not to call them; I prefer mine functional. There's no RAM, no expansion cards, and it doesn't look as if there's any CPU installed. If it's "already running Solaris" why don't they show a picture of it running Solaris? "Not for the expedience of a press release." Of course not...they just...didn't want to risk blowing everyone's minds with how amazing they are...yeah...that's the ticket. For as cocky as he is when he talks about IBM's advertising, he doesn't do much better.

    Also, is it just me, or can that chip fit in the socket 4 different ways? As far as I can tell it's not keyed, unless that gold circle in the upper right is a pin. I guess they trust people to go by the corner that's shaved off.

  29. Because sun can compete here by grahamsz · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's little point in Sun fighting with intel and amd to produce the highest Mhz chip. They can buy opteron's, stick them in boxes and provide a good low to mid-end system.

    OTOH Solaris is already REALLY good at multitasking. The system i'm typing this on has almost 5,000 threads, it's at 80% utilization and it's still very responsive.

    As you put more tasks onto a single CPU it'll have to burn more and more cycles doing context switches and suffer from register starvation.

    Plus large boxes benefit from economies of scale and can have features that aren't practical in smaller ones:

    When a CPU fails the system can take that motherboard out of circulation, then the admin can replace it at their convenience. Same for memory and psu's. Usually no downtime.

    Plus we already know that it takes less resources to admin a unix machine than a windows box. Now consider a 144 CPU x 32 Core machine. Even IF it could only handle the workload of 500 windows servers the admin costs are slashed further.

    Also consider that the cache might be shared, but then consider that all those cores will most likely be running the same application. I'm sure there's lots of code within oracle or java that gets reused frequently by all the processors. An eightcore chip with 16MB of cache will naturally be able to cache much more of the shared resources than 8 cpu's with 2MB cache.