4-Way Sun Fire V40z Reviewed

Hack Jandy writes "Anandtech has a pretty thorough analysis of Sun's V40z 4-way Opteron server that fits in a 3U. Among some of the more noteable benchmarks include a 2 minute, 30 second Linux 2.6.4 kernel compile! Who would have thought only a few years ago that Sun would be the new champion of Linux and AMD?"

Comments

Who says they are?

[IANAAC]

Who would have thought only a few years ago that Sun would be the new champion of Linux and AMD?"

They're doing what they have to do to survive.

If they had their way, it'd be Solaris/Sparc all the way.

Re:Who says they are?

[saleenS281]

you confused "survive" with "grow and maximize profit". As if Sun is going anywhere anytime soon. They're going to die just like novell, BSD, and Microsoft are.
Sun realizes that the opteron provides nearly the performance of their sparc at a cheaper price... why not bundle it up and make MORE money since the cream of the crop for them is service. And more systems sold==more people buying service contracts. And lord knows cheaper prices==more systems sold.

Re:Who says they are?

[Bert64]

Sparc was never really designed for raw performance, but if you consider the performance drop as you increase the load on a system, sparc holds up much better than most other architectures and this is what sparc is designed for. Sparc also scales very nicely to large numbers of processors and is well proven in this field.
Also, Opteron is much newer than sparc, a lot of businesses won't trust something that hasn't been around a few years and is well proven.

Re:I suspected

[DesScorp]

Sparc isn't dead...Sun just realized that they can't keep up with Intel and IBM in the chip wars by themselves. They've teamed up with a Japanese company (Fujitsu?) for future Sparc development. Sparc will be for high-end customers only. They're positioning Opteron for the cheap end.

Re:I smell ...

[otis wildflower]

Hell, what server admin runs Linux, the lowest common denominator of Unix and Unix-workalies, on a real server?

Take a trip to NYC, walk out of the Wall St. 4/5 station, pick a tall building, go up on the roof, unzip your fly, and take a piss. Inside the building you hit you will find a company that transacts hundreds of thousands of dollars of business per MINUTE.

On Linux.

Better be quick though, as there's TONS of jobs moving across the Hudson :/

What was so good about these dead systems?

[Ars-Fartsica]

Was it a modern open unix? You can have that on x86.

Was it high performance? x86 outperforms all of your examples on a per-CPU basis.

Was it incredible graphics? These geezers don't have access to modern gpus.

Was it rugged hardware? x86 boxes are now equipped as good or better than any of your examples.

I'm not sure what it is you got out of using these systems that represents a legit advantage.

Re:What was so good about these dead systems?

[SoupIsGood Food]

Was it high performance? x86 outperforms all of your examples on a per-CPU basis.

This is a recent phenomenon, and has more to do with the politics of monopoly and inept business strategy.

In their heydey, MiPS, Alpha and PA-RISC were neck-and-neck in terms of performance, because all were funded and developed by vibrant companies at the top of their game. Sun was slower, especially in the benchmarks, but had other advantages (like its unreal low-latency).

Then along came Rick Belluzzo, who set both HP and SGI on the Itanium/WindowsNT deathmarch, killing off R&D for all three of the top-tier RISC/Unix architectures... once HP bought Compaq, they destroyed the old DEC R&D machine, and the Alpha with it, mostly out of spite.

What would have happened if HP hadn't decided to burn its bridges for Itanium? What would have happened if SGI had hired a CEO who decided to keep them on the RISC/Unix track and to keep Mips rather than spin it off?

You would see a top teir of premium processors, and a second tier of processors x86 could almost compete with. The way it was in '97, before "Merced" and "NT" were going to be the future of technical computing.

Was it incredible graphics? These geezers don't have access to modern gpus.

Modern SGI workstations, while laboring under an antiquated processor, have GPU subsystems you gamerboys can only have fond wet-dreams about.

Even still, past history shows that with a viable high-performance oriented platform, high performance innovation takes place that takes a few years to filter down to the commodity platforms: SCSI, Fiberchannel, crossbar connections for subsystems, wide datapath expansion cards (DEC's 64bit PCI comes immediately to mind), and GPU subsystems like anything from SGI or HP's Visualize.

Commodity gear has caught up, only because of Moore's law. The vendors essentially gave up their cutting-edge workstation and server markets to push their commodity systems, thinking they would offer higher margins and a wider customer base.

Instead, Dell took everything, slashing margins and eroding everyone else's share of the x86 pie.

Now Sun is making the same mistakes.

Understandable, though, as their SPARC R&D has been a complete mess. The Fujitsu SPARC chips are kinda sexy, but getting long in the tooth.

Opteron is a last-gasp stopmeasure for Sun. It will probably do little except irritate their longterm Solaris/SPARC customers.

SoupIsGood Food

Opetorns're for low end customers

[reachbach]

Sun's selling linux/opteron boxes only to low end customers. Remember, a linux box comes kick ass cheap and does not have half the features of S10. But for the serious ones, Sun still offers S10 on Sparc(heard of the 32 way Niagara?that's what you would call a beast of a server.A server for real internet workloads). The take home points:
1)Sun sells Linux too(surprise,surprise!!).
2)It does this for the low end guys
3)Sparc is still the defacto chip for any serious high end customer.
4)Sun's amd boxes will be far superior to those of IBM & HP. Why? 'cos HP & IBM don't have their own industry standard OSes, while sun has a beauty in the form of Solaris10 that will give you better value for money on your AMD64 processors.
Finally,learn to accept the truth.Call a spade a spade.S10 is simply a superioir OS to any other OS that exists on this planet today. Embrace it or be left behind. Use DTrace if you like S10 or be content with using top and gather cobwebs snuggling up to a cute penguin.

[ And the Sun never sets forever... :-) ]

Re:They will lose

[SunFan]

Look at Alpha - fastest platform in its day but it had the stink of death even though a well-heeled company (more than one through acquisitions) was being it.

Even thought the quality of Sun's marketing dept. is certainly open for debate, it is clearly better than DEC's was.

What is a "high end" chip anyway?

One thing that differentiates UltraSPARC from Opteron is that UltraSPARC is designed to scale to over 1000 CPUs in a system. Opteron's sweet-spot is up to 8 CPUs. Otherwise, both CPUs have similar characteristics, such as ECC support, etc.

A lot of work can get done with 8 CPUs, but for everything else, there's UltraSPARC, POWER, and Itanium.

Re:I suspected

[vrai]

Can you fit more than eight Opterons in a single machine? Can the CPUs be hot swapped? Do they have the proven uptime record of UltraSparcs?

If the answer to any of these questions is 'No' then I forsee a continued market for Sparc hardware. Banks spend millions on new Sparc kit every year - for both new and legacy applications. Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, not every task is suitable for clustering. The bandwidth between nodes is still far too small, and the network induced lag far too great.

When you can get five-nines uptime out of a thirty processor Opteron box - then it'll be time to retire the Sparc range. Until that day comes they'll always have a market.