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Sun To Release 8-Core Niagara 2 Processor
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems is set to announce its eight-core Niagara 2 processor next week. Each core supports eight threads, so the chip handles 64 simultaneous threads, making it the centerpiece of Sun's "Throughput Computing" effort. Along with having more cores than the quads from Intel and AMD, the Niagara 2 have dual, on-chip 10G Ethernet ports with cryptographic capability. Sun doesn't get much processor press, because the chips are used only in its own CoolThreads servers, but Niagara 2 will probably be the fastest processor out there when it's released, other than perhaps the also little-known 4-GHz IBM Power 6."
...If they put THESE under the GPL, along with the T1, they'd be getting more press than they could imagine. If they used these a bit more aggressively - such as using them as a graphics processor on a PC - they'd be getting some amazing press. If they keep them locked in a server closet, it's only then that nobody will care.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This processor will also have a floating-point unit for each core, unlike the UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) which only had one shared amongst all 8 cores. This should make it much more suitable than the T1 for a wide variety of applications. The T1 did great on multithreaded server-type tasks (e.g web, email, database) but would have been pretty hopeless for anything doing more than a bare minimum of FP work.
Yes, but will it run Vista?
...Quite literally I suspect if the cooling system ever breaks!
I like it. In my work with high performance computers, a significant limiting factor in a lot of our tasks was the interprocessor bandwidth. The Niagra2 has a crossbar, with a huge amount of bandwidth available between the different cores and their L2 caches.
I'd like to see some benchmarks, and more technical specs, on these babies.
Well, we tend to have jobs that are somewhat interesting and potentially even what is commonly known as "a life". This may be an unfamiliar concept but it includes things that are more important than the processing capability of the latest SUN processor (though not by much) but a lot of the added value comes from the fact that conversations with a two year old are generally more interesting than debates here.
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
(nt)
customers just want to fit 4 cores in one socket. That's all that matters. That you can get a 1U with two sockets and put 8 intel cores in it under under $2k is a big deal right now.
That said I've always wanted to get my hands on some of these new multicore UltraSparcs. I think they have a lot of potential, and the new ones seem extremely powerful.
Now if only Sun would but the low end one in a mac mini form factor and sell it as a java developers kit then maybe I could play with one. The low end sun fires are something I could almost afford, but I don't really want to keep a 1u on my desk just to try out the technology.
I think the big 64-bit address space and the ability to run lots of threads seems to fit well with Sun's Java. Not that I am a Java developer, I just think it's a good match, and it seems to be that's why people were using the older CoolThreads systems, enterprise Java.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... will a beowulf cluster of these run linux, or blend?
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
huh? ethernet ports where? anyone care to explain?
Am I the only person who read the headline as "Sun to Release 8-Core Viagra 2 Processor"?
No, but I hear the English are releasing one what goes to 11...
They're nocturnal, like Vampires..or raccoons :P
With all due respect mate, you don't have a clue. We, like most other financial companies in the world, buy Sun/IBM P5/HPUX/etc stuff because it is *cheap*... seriously, compared to the mainframes that handle the real back end, these babies are practically free.
Also, if the last thing you have touched is a V440 then you are not exactly up to speed with the cutting edge of Sun products. I promise you that if you had actually ever seen a system running a T1 chip you would not say "their processor division has been kinda lagging". The cool threads stuff is amazing and they are the only people doing anything quite like it. I am not sure if you picked this up from the article but with one chip you get _64_ hardware based threads.
In our internal benchmarks a £20k T2000 with 1 x 8 core T1 outperformed a £100k+ V880 with 8 x 2 core Sparc. Freakin' cool and excellent value for money. Plus all this fits in two rack units.
Working in small companies is nice but I promise you that out there in the big wide world "most" companies don't think that $US20k is very much at all to spend on a system that will be part of a critical service.
Parent: "Hey, would you like to .."
14-yo: "You hate me, don't you! I wish I wasn't born!"
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The two year old here wants me to tell you that "you are mister poo head".
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
"Ok well for that price, we can literally buy a new fairly high performance server from someone like Dell or Gateway (with a 3 year warranty)."
It's all realative. Your 'high performance' Dell or Gateway wouldn't do much other then run bind at one of our locations. You are comparing apples to oranges. These systems are not for you to surf the net with, and as for price, well there is a lot to be gained from stability. I still have sparc systems with OEM (minus the disks) that are close to 20 years old running at some locations. Bet your Dell can't say that.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
I think the Niagara is a pretty solid design, but it's not the processor to end all processors. For service workloads, I don't think you can get a better processor, but you probably don't want one of these processors in your workstation. Sun Microsystems is also headed in the right direction, establishing an open-community around these processors and Solaris.
I'm Trappped at Berkeley.
Then again, many of us have moved to Australia (or Portland, OR - which is almost the same thing), so don't read too much into the "time of post"
Niagara? I don't want to know what happens when one of these has to compute an integer overflow, do I?
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
can it blend? - yes I'm sure it can, the iphone blended.
speaking of which how much does this processor cost, and why doesn't Sun Microsystems make laptops, I was looking for Unix machines recently and I decided to go with the Mac book pro, rather than the Linux machines (laptops) at Dell, because of the hardware and general lack of processing power, which doesn't seem to lend itself to virtualizing other Operating systems.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Sounds like you want to run Solaris 10. It can do exactly that, and it comes up VERY fast on modern hardware.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Maybe something like this?
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
They do. Ultra 3 Mobile.
There are also the units from Tadpole, and I'm sure others
http://www.personaltours.ca/niagara-info.html
Deleted
You have a funny way of viewing the world I must say. It seems to me that as far as you are concerned, unless I can pop down to PC World and buy one these it does not count as relevant to the world at large. Forget the fact that every financial transaction you make, every TV show you watch, every phone call you make and every device you use is made possible by systems that the muppets down the local computer shop would never even have heard of.
If all you are trying to argue is that the latest chip from Sun will not make headlines in the news tonight then we are in agreement. However, that does not matter. Most of what is interesting and important in computing and let's be honest, pretty much everything is of no interest to the masses.
But hey mate, it is a free world so you can go on thinking that the latest ATI graphics card is what matters in the computer industry, no skin off my nose. But here is something you might want to think about, the same companies that don't flinch at paying half a million for a server also don't mind paying serious money to someone to make sure they run properly.. which is nice.
A few points.
1) Sun is not trying to win the hearts and minds of home users - that is not their market. Sun would see few benefits from pushing their products in the mainstream media. Trade press is where they reach the decision makers. How many Oracle adverts do you see in game magazines and tabloid newspapers? Not very many, they tend to advertise in business oriented outlets such as The Economist.
2) Some small businesses don't care about computers at all. The companies that need Sun will buy Sun. The companies who can run their business out of a box of post-it notes will do the former.
3) When you buy mission critical hardware, you don't look for a '3 year warranty'. You look for a service and support contract based on how critical the hardware is to your business. If you can run your business on a home-made 486dx system running Minix then that is probably the best option.
4) Sun being worth 10% of Intel is irrelevant. The Economist sells far fewer copies than The Sun (a pretty terrible UK tabloid) but I know which one I'd chose for a serious overview of world news.
5) This is a techie web site so news like this seems pretty relevant here, even if most of us can't afford to buy the kit.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
I'm going to have to agree with the coward on this one. You don't have a clue. You won't see Sun stuff on the desktops. Sun boxes have their place: The high-performance market. Where I work (hint: Feds), we have multiple Sun boxes set up, which run our virtual servers. If there's one thing that you can never get enough of in this kind of setup, it's multiple threading and RAM. The integrated networking is also a huge boost, since that's the last major bottleneck before hitting the clients.
He wasn't trying to say that Sun deserves more press. Sure, small businesses and even many large businesses don't require that kind of power. But the coward was right: Sun provides good quality at (relatively) dirt cheap prices. Hence why they make this kind of thing.
You try running 5+ heavily used virtual servers (Each running a component of Oracle) on one Intel or AMD box. Let me know how that goes for you.
PS - Solaris kicks ass.
Argh, I'll preview next time.
Point 2 should have read:
"2) Some small businesses don't care about computers at all. The companies that need Sun will buy Sun. The companies who can run their business out of a box of post-it notes will do the *latter*."
-- Using the preview button since 2005
How dare you correct your own mistakes!
I, and my fellow grammar Nazi overlords, were just about to rip your lousy post to shreds.
Rock and T2 look very promising, but before that their processor division was lagging so badly they were putting re-badged Fujitsu chips in their high-end machines to try to stay competitive. Between the end of the dot-com era to the release of the T1, Sun's microprocessor division seemed like dead weight. They made a huge gamble to start designing web app optimised chips as the bubble was bursting, and it looks like it will end up paying off, but it comes at the end of a period where 'lagging' is a very polite way of describing their performance.
By the way, there seem to be a lot of low-power SPARC variants, but I've never seen a palmtop form-factor device containing one. Do they exist? I'd be very interested in one, since SPARC, even SPARC32, is a lot better supported than ARM, in spite of the latter's ubiquity.
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Looks like the Ultra 3 mobile might have beeen a nice laptop, but it's no longer orderable. I didn't look to see if they have anything to replace it.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
"The Niagara looks cool but the base model is $10,000 which gets you the 4 core version of the chip and 8GB of RAM. If you want the 8 core setup, that's $21,500 minimum. At those prices, there's going to be little mainstream press as that is out of the range of even most companies. Thus most people just don't care, as Sun never will be bringing it to the masses (barring a massive strategy change)." OK, great I got the money...does it run games?
That, that really grinds my gears!
Linspire (back in the day - I've been on Ubuntu for quite a while now) worked this way. IIRC you had to hold down a key to rescan for hardware, otherwise it assumed nothing changed and booted very briskly. I'm surprised it didn't catch on with more popular distros.
Also, I thought http://www.linuxbios.org/Welcome_to_LinuxBIOS would get through POST and to the payload in just a couple of seconds.
Only one silly meme per customer please.
Will it run Doom?
To me the most exciting part is that they're putting 2x10Gb ethernet ports directly on the CPU. The crypto is cool too: I hope it's not encapsulated entirely in the ethernet, so apps can call it directly.
If they made these CPUs cheap enough, we could put them on PCI-e cards in a Xeon, and run a Linux cluster over the PCI-e, coordinated by apps running on the Xeon. Or maybe stuff a Niagara/PCI-e box with extras, like we used to do with Mac Quadra 950/NuBus cards. But this time with 20Gbps ethernet per node, for a networked grid of nodes.
--
make install -not war
The quads from Intel provide four physical cores per socket. That is the definition of a quad in this context. The exact workings of how many bits of silicon there are, how they talk to each other and to the rest of the system is, to 99.999% of users and computer buyers, background fluff.
This was the same as when Intel put two single-core chips into a package to release a 'dual core'. Lots of people like you jumped up and down and pointed out it wan't *real* dual core, and how the FSB issue would cripple performance. Amazingly, it wasn't the case - they sold in droves, and real-world performance was good enough to carry Intel through to the 'true' dual core, the Core 2 Duo.
If the competition had anything out that was the same cost and performed significantly better than the 'fake' quad cores, you would have an argument. But they haven't and you don't. Bear in mind I'm talking about the huge x86/x64 market, not the relatively low volume non-x86 server market.
What Intel did back then and again now is perfectly sensible. They have millions of high yield, robust dual core chips being churned out, and they have built into the infrastructure the ability to put two into a package, lower the speed a bit to drop the per-core heat output, and sell reasonably priced (now) quad core chips. When the drop to 45nm happens, they will release their 'real' quad cores, and pretty quickly put two of those into a package to start selling oct-core (whatever we're going to call them). And so it goes.
What's the alternative? Not sell quads until 45nm comes out? Not working out too well for AMD is it? I've asked the question before here and on realworldtech.com - at what point will the FSB problem actually become a painful problem for the Intel chips? Well, not yet (4 core) is the answer, despite dire predictions from the AMD camp for years. My gues is that, shock of shocks, Intel have actually thought it through - and that's why CSI is coming. When the number of cores gets to the point where FSB will actually hurt performance relative to the AMD architecture, that's when CSI will kick in. Maybe at 8 cores, maybe at 16.
What, you don't need quad core yet? Fine, stop your bitching and choose what's right for you. Vive la difference, and 3 cheers for a market that gives us the choice.
Sun's stuff isn't expensive, at least not if your workload fits into their profile. We are doing a bake-off between a number of vendors for a Peoplesoft/JD Edwards business intelligence project and the current cheapest hardware is Sun, beating the Windows/HP offering by 10% while being significantly more scalable. Then there is the added bonus that the 3 year operating cost is also 10% less due to needing so many fewer boxes thanks to the Niagra chip on the web/app servers.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Now that's not to say that there aren't server loads that are like that. Specifically with java app servers, it's not uncommon to have hundreds of threads doing light weight tasks.
I like the direction that they are moving in though. In a few generations, I'm sure they will either have competitive chips across the board or not make chips anymore and the energy efficiency is a long overdue area to focus on.
And it's also really a matter of target markets. Sun's biggest customer segments are the US gov't and large financial institutions, and it's likely that those two customer bases comprise at least 1/3 of Sun's revenues. For them, $20k/server is par for the course, and also inline with what competitors are charging for similar gear.
The other point made above is that Sun realized a long time ago that they can't compete margin-wise with Intel on the desktop CPU market. Way back when, Sun's revenue used to be workstation driven (hence, the stock ticker....SUNW, W=workstation). But then the Microsoft marketing engine of the 90's allowed Intel to kill the viability of that market for them, and they've since concentrated on the server market.
Truth be told, they struggled mightily throughout the late 90's and early 00's due to this, but this new architecture really holds promise, and is way ahead of anything that Intel or AMD have out now. Like the original synopsis says, their only real competition is IBM's Power 6, which is a beast of a chip in its own right.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
One quite important point with the T2000 cost is that Oracle requires 0.25 license per core as opposed to 0.50 license/core with Intel/AMD systems.
I've got 2 T2000/32GB ram boxes here and if you remember their limitations and run what they are designed for, they are awesome.
Resistance is not futile - www.gnu.org
"Do No Evil"
It's like it's 1999 all-over again, except this time Sun actually has revenue in-line with expectations. I continue to maintain Sun is this century's Bell Labs and Xerox PARC all rolled into one.
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Your troll-fu is weak, Young Sycraft. You're arguing something we already know, and something that most people will acknowledge - Sun isn't for the hobbyist or the home/small business market.
But saying they don't get press is a misnomer. They do get press - in the publications that matter to their market. You'll find ads and articles for Sun in places like CIO magazine, Infoworld, and Information Week. Tom's Hardware, in the big scheme of things, is great for commodity hardware review, but when you're building a 24/7 datacenter, they are probably the last place to look for information.
And finally, with there being a greater focus on virtualization and data center consolidation, a server that can handle 64 simultaneous threads will go a long way to conserving datacenter floor space, lowering cooling costs, and using less electricity. So it may have a greater upfront cost, but if you factor it out over 10 years, it will pay for itself in lower energy bills for the datacenter.
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While I'm sure your 20k T1 outperformed your 100k v880. It does not show that the T1 is a better choice than an Intel/AMD system.
Sun's stuff are slower than IBM's POWER line, and they are nowhere in the same league as IBM mainframes, and IBM mainframes are not in the same league as real nonstop computing clusters.
Mainframes = very good uptimes, but you have _scheduled_ downtimes.
Stuff like OpenVMS or Tandem = uptimes of _decades_ possible, don't even need scheduled downtimes where you turn everything off, you can run while replacing the hardware. With the Tandem stuff you even have CPUs running the same thing at the same time for real redundancy. Only thing is HP seems to be burying VMS and Tandem.
Sun? They didn't even have hardware instruction retry till Fujitsu SPARC. For many years it was pretty embarassing that the really high end SPARCs were Fujitsu rather than Sun - the fastest SPARC systems till just a few years ago were all Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER (I haven't bothered checking recently, the last I recall Sun started using Fujitsu stuff for their high end systems).
Sun got where they were by making relatively cheap Unix RISC workstations and they provided servers for areas where reliability and availability didn't really matter as much as the real "high end" stuff. They caught the internet wave for "cheap" webservers etc and made a lot of money then.
The problem now with Sun is, they get blasted at the low end by x86, and at the high end they pale in comparison to IBM's stuff.
For "normal" webserver/db/internet/corporate stuff it's x86.
In the HPC arena it's x86 (for scale out), and IBM (for scale up).
So where does Sun fit?
Just go google for benchmarks of T1 vs Intel vs AMD. The T1 doesn't even do that well for performance/power consumption when compared to the Intel woodcrest CPU: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2772
For Sun's sake, their Niagara 2 better be magnitudes much better than their T1, if not it'll be out of date even before it's released.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be happy if Sun succeeds, but they've fallen way behind.
If you don't like the Anandtech benchmark I linked to, go check the SAP one:
0 5.pdf).
3 05.pdf).
http://www50.sap.com/benchmarkdata/sd2tier.asp
And you'll see what I meant about Sun being squished between x86 and IBM. Look at the T1 showings (add the 4 linked entries together to get the total performance, or go for the single one at: http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert47
Compare with x86 or IBM POWER or even Fujitsu's 2 year old stuff (http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert1
Go compare the SPEC benchmarks too if there are any T1 ones.
They sent me a Sunfire last year telling me it had capabilities it didn't. I sent it back. If $21,500 is the price tag, then this would outperform what I was considering at approximately the same price. I doubt these have the capabilities I was looking for, (I want Windows in Xen) but the price isn't going to be it's limiting factor.
By the way, if they're still running it, the Try and Buy program is every bit as good as it sounds. They shipped me a server for the asking, I tested it, and sent it back, all on their dime (except my time.) If I'd talked to salespeople honest enough to say "I don't know" rather than "of course" I wouldn't have had it sent in the first place and might be running one of their servers right now. Maybe next year.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Don't get me wrong. Most of a large financial house doesn't need a Sun server. However, those who do (e.g. quants) really do. Same goes for government, biotech, military contractors, etc.
I bought a (24-thread) T1 because it was *cheap* for the specs, and because I can use all that parallelism for my Web server ( http://mirror-uk-rb1.gallery.hd.org/ ) and stuff it is doing on the backend, and it is *lovely*.
I also use various flavours of Intel chips including Core Duos in the MacBook that I'm typing on now and in my new low-power Linux laptop that's replaced 5 old Solaris servers ( http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html ), but I have to say again that the T1/Niagara is lovely to write threaded code for (eg in Java).
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
I have been actively interested in the T1 and T2 series for a while. Currently, my backup server at work is a v880 (Sparc III) with 8 GigE interfaces.
I could replace it, and get more throughput from a T2000, but the issue was doing restores would lose that edge from poor single thread performance
The Niagara 2 series is set to have 1.4X the single thread performance, plus the higher simultaneous threads (Though a slightly longer pipeline).
Since I am moving away from tape and going to Virtual Tape Library tech, I won't be constrained by how many backups I can do and avoid over multiplexing. I plan on doing 24-32 (or even more) simultaneous backups to virtual tape drives without skipping a beat. The only thing then will be keeping the network from being over-saturated.
Don't have any 10Gbe switches in house yet, but that can't be too far off. I'd likely put in 2 4 port 1Gbe cards and pump them like no tomorrow. I'm getting about 20-30MB/sec from each machine, so assuming 140MB/sec on a GigE port, and 8 of them, I can handle over 1100MB/sec, but doing 32 backups would be about 950MB/sec. It is close, but should work.
It's an apples vs. oranges argument. Pick the tool based on what you need, not on what you see on the shelves at Best Buy or Fry's.
Last I heard, they don't. However, the UltraSPARC line isn't really what you want in a laptop anyways. Much better to get an X64 laptop and run Solaris10/x86 on it. You can use the list of tested and proven hardware for Solaris x86 to make sure it'll run without fiddling.
There's been a lot of (justified) doubt in the past about Sun's commitment to Solaris x86, bit it clearly is the future of consumer-directed Solaris. And it rocks.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I agree about the x64, and I am/was one of those doubters.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
All that and the 64 threads run at 84 watts maximum (not TDP)
:-P
Please note that it doesn't *run* 64 threads simultaneously. It *manages* 8 threads per core -- but each core has only two integer units, one load-store unit, and one floating point unit. At best a core can have ops from four different threads in simultaneous execution, but this will be a very rare case (when int, int, float, load/store happen at same cycle). Most often each core will be able to simultaneously execute instructions from just one or two threads -- which all is still excellent for 84W!
It just irks me when people read "manages 64 threads" as "is a 64-core uber-chip", when what they have is just a wider version of Intel's idling-eliminating HyperThreading (in each of the eight cores). Surprisingly Sun PR hasn't made much of an effort to remedy the misconception
Yeah. I have to use an umbrella every time I put a shrimp on the barbie.
(Of course that's nonsense, none of us ever use umbrellas)
[...] and why doesn't Sun Microsystems make laptops, I was looking for Unix machines recently and I decided to go with the Mac book pro, rather than the Linux machines (laptops) at Dell, because of the hardware and general lack of processing power, which doesn't seem to lend itself to virtualizing other Operating systems.
That's odd.
I'm looking at right now a Dell Latitude D630 that has 3.5 GB of addressable ram, a Core 2 Duo T7300 dual core chip @ 2 Ghz, and an NVidia Quadro graphics card. And it's running Centos 5 just fine.
~Wx
sig?
One: it will get rid of Vista in the sense that Vista isn't ported to it.
Two: you'd reboot these things once every many months. Who cares if it takes half an hour each time?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
(The funniest thing about this article is that a year after they published it, Gillette actually did release a five-bladed shaver!)
Uh, how does that stop them from getting blasted by x86 stuff from Dell, HP, IBM etc?
Selling x86 stuff is a bitter pill that Sun has to swallow since they've had duds with SPARC so far (unlike IBM with POWER).
There's probably a market for better x86 servers and Sun might be the one. BUT currently why should anyone buy a Sun x86 server instead of from the others? So that you can run Solaris 10[1]? Is there any evidence that they make the best x86 hardware for the price?
[1] IBM/HP consultants will happily charge companies with more money than available skilled staff to help them put/build all sorts of stuff on Solaris on Sun/HP/IBM/Dell/whitebox, what does Sun offer in that area? Other companies will just use stuff like Linux or even windows (IBM/HP will still be happy to "help" you for a fee in any case).
Sun Fire? That comes under 'servers for areas where reliability and availability didn't really matter as much as the real "high end" stuff'.
:(
Sun's lucky that many people were/are willing to pay a lot for something that's not really much more reliable than Linux/BSD on decent x86 hardware.
Maybe those people were accustomed to Microsoft levels of reliability and assumed you had to pay much more.
Then again with the sort of people about nowadays it's often no point having servers and software that can run for decades. Just only today someone rebooted one of our servers that was running fine, well as fine as it could be - the actual problem was network related.
But maybe that could mean something with Dell's level of "quality" making more sense.
Just leave it on. A PC will last longer if you don't power cycle it. I build em' fire em'up dump on slak and the machine stays on for the 3 years or so I use it.
I'm on my 5th one. It's worth turning monitors on and off but not the computer.
Each core supports eight threads, so the chip handles 64 simultaneous threads, making it the centerpiece of Sun's "Throughput Computing" effort.
Wow! Only 64 threads, eh? That's the problem with threads, you can't have too many of them because switching from one thread to another is very expensive, cycle-wise. In other words, as long as threads remain the only multitasking mechanism used by the computer industry, super fast, fine-grained multiprocessing will remain a dream. It gets worse. There is another problem with threads that is even worse than this. Threads are inherently asynchronous. Until and unless the computer industry comes to its senses and realizes that asynchronous processing makes it impossible to implement programs with deterministic timing, we will continue to pay the heavy price of software unreliability. Switch to a non-algorithmic, signal-based, synchronous software model (with the supporting CPU architecture), and the problem will disappear. Threads suck! Period. One man's opinion.
Thanks for the info. but I'm sure you can forgive me if I just want something off the shelf. I also, want the virtualization software to just run, and I need to virtualize whatever OS I want. Your system would be nice if Dell was selling them with the option of adding Xen, and incidentally running a *nix system from the start. Honestly, I don't understand why Dell doesn't offer this sort of thing it kinda seems like a waste M$ on a 64bit system, selling Linux without a 64bit option is kinda goofy too.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Anyone got links to user discussions or reviews on 4.7GHz Power6 since they've been out for 2 months? I've read all the IBM, Oracle, Data Center promo stuff.
I just went to their site, and a Niagra 1 T1 with 6 cores x 4 threads is 3900, not 10k. That is not expensive, a 2x4core intel server with decent RAM, HD, and network interfaces is at least 3k, and I'm pretty sure that niagra is going to blow away the intel solution.
Those 64 threads do not execute simultaneously. Sun has lengthened the pipeline for Niagara2 and a added a "pick" stage where 2 threads per processor are chosen to execute. As a result, Niagara2 can execute 16 threads simultaneously. Compare that to an 8-way opteron system which executes only 8 threads simultaneously, but which is superscalar and executes at least 2 instructions/thread/cycle (with twice the cycles, bear in mind--3GHz). In other words, Niagara2 could theoretically execute (16*1.5) 24 billion instr/sec whereas the cheaper 8-way 3GHz opteron could (theoretically) execute more than twice that many. So, speaking of (theoretical maximum) throughput, the opteron clearly has an advantage.
Of course the opteron will stall for a long time on cache misses and therein lies the true Niagara advantage.
That is comparing proprietary hardware from Sun, to other proprietary hardware from Sun. The comparison is beside the point, since the V880 uses US-IVs which are in-order (!!), low clockspeed processors. US-IVs are undoubtedly outrun by x86.
The question is whether a £20,000 T2000 would outrun a £15,000 8-way Opteron system from Sun. The answer seems to be: yes, modestly, but only for very specific workloads which are severely affected by memory latency (like OLTP) or which are benefited by application-specific hardware in the Niagara cores (like SSL webserving).
Indeed, nobody else is taking the fine-grained multithreaded approach.
The "throughput computing" strategy was a brilliant move for Sun. It was the best thing they could have done. It was the only way they could make Sparc-compatible chips for commodity servers that are at least somewhat price competitive with x86 offerings. It was really the only way of saving the Sparc franchise.
With that said, it relegates Sun to a niche.
Quite true. For more info on the way its cores work, see the UltraSPARC T1 article on Wikipedia (which I have edited quite a bit). Each core is a barrel processor, meaning each stage in the pipeline is handling an instruction from a different thread. This adds complexity, but in exchange it means that branch mis-prediction is no longer a problem - any branch instruction has already been through the execute stage and the Program Counter modified before the next instruction of the thread gets fetched.
The other big advantage with the multi-threaded UltraSPARC T1/T2 design is that it has high throughput. While a single-threaded CPU has to wait on cache misses, the T1/T2 just continues chugging along with its remaining threads. It's switching threads on every clock cycle, so each thread gets only 1/8th of the 'power' of each core. But because it's doing something on every single clock cycle, it can do a lot of work - as long as the work is multi-threaded. That's its weakness.
I was lucky enough to get to play around with a Niagara 1 demo unit a year or so ago, and it was mediocre as a general-purpose server. The system was amazingly fast if you could keep its 32 threads saturated (and I notice that the new one is 64 threads), but if you were only running, say, 8 threads, you would do as well on a more mundane server. I don't have the exact numbers here, but from what I recall:
The first test was a "make" test. On my desktop machine (generic dual-core Athlon), configure for some large software package (BerkeleyDB, I think, to run more benchmarks on) took a minute, and make -j 3 took 5. On the Niagara, configure took 5 minutes, and make -j 40 took only one.
For high-concurrency database benchmarks, the cost of synchronization made the Niagara slower than a standard AMD-based server. For a less concurrent load, the Niagara was of course much faster. Interestingly, a dual-core server performed much better here than a dual-processor single-core server, because the synchronization cost was lower.
For web applications, the Niagara did well for simple applications, but introduced unacceptable latencies for more CPU-intensive ones.
For anything floating-point, the original Niagara choked due to its single FPU, but that's what the T2 is supposed to fix.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I've told them no Vista allowed. One employee went ahead and got a Vista laptop (in our Houston office, rather than our UK office), I said no freakin way, and after a chat with me her manager had her take it back to the store..
If he'd said anything else then that's probably a good time/reason for me to quit and move on! On to living in the middle of nowhere, possibly farming potatoes instead of managing IT for a bunch of crazy oil industry workers.. I've noticed a couple of my hairs are going grey/white, and I'm only 23!
which is totally what she said
There's some (very little) talk of Sol 10 x86, mostly pushed by the "If it ain't Sun/Solaris, it's crap!!" crowd.. but its' not getting much more then a little mention from the ISVs because to them it's another whole platform to support, and why bother when linux is working ok and they did all that work to move to linux (at customer request) a few years back. Price of a system is rarely a company's most significant cost (within an order of magnitude) when you're dealing with high performance computing. It's the people and the data vendor relationships that usually cost you the bulk of your outlay. Hardware of just about any sort is fairly cheap by comparison. True, but for us the highest cost is the license costs of the software. So they want to get as many jobs as they can out the door as fast as they can, and SPARC can't do it.
Now the big push from us (IT and engineering) is for the ISVs to parallelize their tools as much as possible. They were ok for awhile there when CPU speeds kept going up, but now that the CPU makers have basically given up on the speed jumps and are going multi-core, the tools need to parallelize too. Thus far, the multi-core and multi-hosted tools still run orders of magnitude faster on linux hosts vs even the latest from Sun.
[*]There was a very short stint with IA64 as king for huge RAM jobs (128Gig+ in the box) for the last testing stages, but x86_64 overtook the cpus in speed awhile ago, and now you can get 256Gig+ hosts (we've recently ordered a few of those). We've got a small amount of 32bit linux boxes left too.. mostly for support of older tools.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Where I work our datacenter is a bit constrained on space, power, and cooling. Adding these bad boys allows us to support many more applications, websites, and whatever else the business wants with less power and cooling and capital cost than what we used last year. And, yes, you can get a three year warranty on brand name Intel servers but the reliability and serviceability of Sun gear lasts way beyond three years.
I think their desktops suck. And I wasn't too much of a fan of Solaris until Sol 10. It was boring. Run Solaris x86 if you want to try it cheap. Linux has made it much better by forcing new features liek Dtrace and ZFS. The cost of entry is a bit steep (and over powered) for SME but if you want serious computing power you can do much worse than Sun. They've been written off more times than I care to count (kind of like Apple) but they're still standing.
Now, I'm no Sun fan boy. I work with Linux exclusively these days because that's the world I live in, and it's what my application wants, but if I were in the business of high-powered computation and I needed a box to run a parallel, non-distributed application, I would run it on a Sun. There was a very short stint with IA64 as king for huge RAM jobs (128Gig+ in the box) for the last testing stages, but x86_64 overtook the cpus in speed awhile ago, and now you can get 256Gig+ hosts (we've recently ordered a few of those). We've got a small amount of 32bit linux boxes left too.. mostly for support of older tools. I think you live in the world where very fast, single-threaded, memory-hungry computation is king. In that world, Intel running Linux might be the right call. Just don't make the mistake of assuming that all the world is your back yard.
"Sun Smoke. Don't breath this."
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
This processor is ideal for a Veritas Netbackup media server. Netbackup is heavily multi-threaded, and getting the backup data across the network to the server will be tremendously aided by the on-chip 10G bandwidth. Symantec has been doing this with great success.
Yes, but what else did you compare it to? We had "experts" at a company I used to work for configure a T2000 as an Oracle database server and it ran at 1/6th the speed of a five year old HP intel box we were using for development while we waited on the "high-end" prod equipment. After a month of fiddling, it still ran at 1/6th the speed. I am app dev guy, haven't been invovled in HW more than I had to for the last 10 years but I must say, Sun was the emporor's new clothes the way it played out on that project.
It's turtles all the way down!
Imagine 8 web servers each on it's own "server" in an LDom - with the ability to handle multiple requests. While you can do something similar with Solaris 10 containers, LDoms give you control over the memory and independent O/S images.
LDoms can be used with containers. In my example, those 8 "servers" could be owned by different departments who could use containers to have a test and development containers within the same LDom.
People are having good results from similar efforts with VMware for a non-trivial free. By the way, LDoms are free.
Did anyone mention that the T1-based servers such as the T1000 and T2000 don't require a lot of power? 300-350 watts Replacing 8 older Sun SPARC servers with one (as in my example) can save a lot of space and electricity.
-johnj
John J. McLaughlin, Editor-in-Chief/CTO, System News Inc. Publishers of "System News for Sun Users"
I was also 'lucky' enough to play around with a Niagara processor.
I happened to have my own highly threaded app.
It ran really, really slowly. The sun engineers eventually figured out that two of my
threads would saturate one of their processor cores.
(there was zero fp in my code).
With 32 threads, their fastest T2000 took 10,600 seconds.
My old, dual xeon 2.4ghz machine took 11,494 seconds.
An 8 way opteron 2.8ghz machine was 11.6 times faster than the niagara.
A a Sun Sparc V890 8cpu, 16 core was8.3 times faster than the niagara.
Since their t2000 cost around $20k, and a dual 2.4ghz xeon cost around $500-$1000,
that made the price/performance roughly 20-40 times better for a xeon than the niagara.
Perhaps their new chip is higher performing than their earlier generation.
You can see all the gory details at www.weasel.com/comp-perf.html
source code available upon request.