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Is the Sparc T4 Too Little Too Late?
packetrat writes "Ars Technica reports on Monday's launch of the Sparc T4, and how it finally (nearly 20 years after everyone else) brings out-of-order execution to Sun Sparc ... er, Oracle Sparc. But the benchmarks that Oracle has thrown up (surprise) are a smokescreen for the fact that the processor is still woefully behind state of the art, and it serves mostly as a placeholder to keep the remaining Sparc user base from defecting to Intel — even as Oracle is selling systems based on Intel and Oracle Linux. With the right benchmarks, my minivan outperforms a Maserati. The T4 is a minivan."
Isn't this a repeat from yesterday?
Or are we going to see this story once per core?
With the right benchmarks, my minivan outperforms a Maserati. The T4 is a minivan.
When you're moving lots and lots of boxes, then yes, a minivan does outperform a Maserati. It's a pretty good analogy IMHO.
As Seymour Cray noted: Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.
Personally I've always found SPARC boxes to be good with I/O.
Well, not for this. The T range of processors has been GPLed for some time. You know the rule with Open Source - if you don't like it, you can fork it. True, the fab plant might be a problem, but if the design was good and seriously competed with the official version, you'd find someone to sponsor it.
I don't find the new T4 compelling. There's a lot to be said for the MIPS64 and the current POWER chips, and even the Itanium 2 has some novel features that are interesting. I also very much prefer the Transputer and iWarp idea of dedicated busses linking up as large an array of processors as you like to the nonsense we currently have of SMP/multicore designs. Processor-in-Memory also has neat features that are massively underexploited.
But nobody expects Oracle to do any of that kind of work, any more than they expected HP's previous CEO to understand why hardware might be important. Oracle isn't a hardware company, it doesn't understand hardware design, and should not be trying to make chips.
It's easy for a company to get locked into an architecture when using home grown or proprietary software. I would bet that there are a bunch out there that really need an upgrade, and this will allow them to postpone an expensive and business threatening change for a few more years.
Oracle is extending the life of it's investment in Sun, but I don't see evidence that it is really developing it.
They still make those?!
"With the right benchmarks, my minivan outperforms a Maserati. The T4 is a minivan."
Not everyone needs a Maserati ('wants' might be a different deal). In fact in many situations the Maserati is not a very good choice, the minivan is a better choice. For example, if the benchmark is cheaply/easily hauling spouse, two kids, and the family dog along with appropriate gear to the state park for a camp-out, yes, the minivan outperforms the Maserati. In day to day commuting, my Jetta TDI is a better choice than either the Maserati or minivan. And when the weather is good, a bicycle is an even better choice. So in the car analogy world, one should compare the car to the driving requirements before making a purchasing decision.
As for the assertions of SPARC being a poor choice, tell that to the folks with the #1 supercomputer in the world (top500.org).
SPARC T4 maybe late but not too little, it may only succeed in delaying the migration to Intel, AMD and IBM, but it will be more than capable to match them and by the time the T5 is out -if Oracle commits to it- Oracle will start to eat into the other players.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
In fairness, for some of the dense, massively multithreaded stuff that SPARC has been targeting in the last few years, in order execution gives you some power and transistor budget savings. Compare the Intel Atom, which ditched the out-of-order capability of their other mainstream processors.
But I was surprised to learn that Sun hadn't previously done out-of-order SPARC, although apparently Fujitsu have.
Sun had out of order SPARCs for years, contrary to the article's claims. Sun had a two pronged strategy, one aimed at single thread performance (the UltraSPARC series), the other at multithreaded performance (the T series). The UltraSPARCs were never really that good, so were eventually dropped in favour of the Fujitsu SPARC64 series, and the replacement (code named "rock") was dropped by Oracle because progress seemed stalled forever, but they did indeed have out of order execution, register renaming, and "Rock" had a promising "pre-execution" thread that was supposed to alert cache controllers ahead of time to pre-fetch data that can't be statically predicted, dropping cache misses to near zero.
The purpose of the multithreaded processor was to support mainly I/O bound tasks, and lots of them - web servers are like this, though more in the past where web content was more static. In those systems, a T series SPARC system noticeably outperformed similarly priced competition (with similar reliability - you could get a lot cheaper if you didn't care about component quality).
The single threading improvements in the T series are being added because even I/O bound systems often have compute-bound tasks. In particular, the T4 lets you assign one high priority thread which gets to hog CPU resources, in addition to out of order execution and other techniques that all threads benefit from, so I/O bound threads don't get hung up waiting for a single CPU-bound task to finish.
You're the reporter, why don't you do the research and report your findings? If you want a poll, then do that. But your audience isn't going to have the answer to that kind of philosophical question; that's your job.
BTW, my policy is to never read articles where the title is a question. But I'm such a nerd, I have to click on everything related to the T4.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Granted even if the sparc t4 is either underpowered or possibly too late to the party, you can't compare x86 vs sparc. I worked as a Sun Tech support and i have to say when i sat down and saw a 200 mhz sparc keeping up with an 800 mhz i was shocked. The architecture are two totally different beasts. Also i hated working on x86 based systems, sparc based systems were 10 times easier to diagnose and retrieve information from.
The x86 based boxes were a cheaper alternative and were pretty terrible imo.
Sorry, for all intents and purposes SPARC is a dead architecture as is Itanium. Moving forward you'll have X86, X86-64 (AMD-64) and ARM...
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
As hard as it might be for some to believe, many customers actually make decisions based on more factors that just raw single-thread processor performance or elegant processor architecture! History is littered with many wonderful processors that led on those counts that are now completely extinct. It's interesting how sparc has been bashed for clock speed forever (even when it took x86 multiple cycles to accomplish the same work) and now that they have announced 3Ghz nobody has anything to say about clock speed.
For these systems there are plenty of other characteristics that are just as, if not more, important. There are a LOT of applications that require industrial-strength in all aspects - something that you simply can't get by stacking a pile of commodity Intel/AMD boxes running Linsux. It's evident from the moment one powers up one of these things - stone-age BIOS. Only a nitwit thinks that requiring a "graphical" display or KVM(IP) in a data center with 100s or 1000s of nodes is a good thing.
Everyone better realize that just one processor line from one company will be detrimental to innovation and progress.
In the environment these systems are targeted for, what is important is the whole package - performance, reliability, maintainability, space/power, cost, etc. These systems will do very well.
Welcome to 1990. It's 2011 now - x86 is no slouch.
Well, like all benchmarks, it depends on your needs.
If it's getting 6 kids to soccer practice in a vehicle with a high safety rating, then the mini-van is more suited to your purposes.
Of course, what CPU functionality in this car analogy corresponds to having the mini-van be preferable to a Maserati ... I don't think I can answer that. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I can get a quad-socket T4 with eight cores per. That's 32 cores in a system.
Or I can get a quad-socket Opteron system with 12 cores per. That's 48 cores in a system.
Even better, the CPUs at 2.2 GHz and mobo for the latter arrangement can be had for under $6,000. Add the same memory and hot-swap hard drives as a 4-socket T4 and you're talking under $13,000.
The problem is that 3 GHz T4 costs over $90,000. I understand all the other stuff that goes into their server, but I doubt it's worth a $77,000 premium.
Simple question, simple answer.
You had 800MHz in 1990? Bullshit.
I saw a 40MHz computer in 1990 and was in awe. I think it was a Mac IIfx. It had 640x480 graphics with 16.7 million colours, a 68040 processor and I think it might have had a DSP that could do CD-quality sound.
In those days anything above 33MHz was very special indeed, and I think we were just about getting to 1 million transistors on a chip.
My dad used to have a 286-12 laptop (Compaq SLT). I learned MS-DOS on that and a bit of C coding with Lattice C.
Stick Men
And they sell thousands of times more minivans than Maseratis. Selling minivans isn't a bad business to be in at all.
It was great to have you around for the party. Too bad eventually Oracle got a hold of you.
At this point, even if it was the most awesome CPU ever designed, who wants to touch it now its attached to that evil corporate monster ( that has no choice due to legacy system investements )?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How come T4 has less transistors than Sandy Bridge and yet T4 manages to have 8 thread per core, while Sandy Bridge only has 1.35 thread per core?
Well, not for this. The T range of processors has been GPLed for some time. You know the rule with Open Source - if you don't like it, you can fork it. True, the fab plant might be a problem, but if the design was good and seriously competed with the official version, you'd find someone to sponsor it.
I don't find the new T4 compelling. There's a lot to be said for the MIPS64 and the current POWER chips, and even the Itanium 2 has some novel features that are interesting. I also very much prefer the Transputer and iWarp idea of dedicated busses linking up as large an array of processors as you like to the nonsense we currently have of SMP/multicore designs. Processor-in-Memory also has neat features that are massively underexploited.
Is the T4 GPLed already? If it is, it could be the basis of platforms for not just Solaris, but BSD and Linux as well. I see no reason why Linux should be restricted to x86 - those who don't want to be stuck on Oracle can after buying the hardware have one of the FOSS unixes - BSD or Linux, and take things from there.
I agree about both Power, as well as MIPS IV, but not Itanium. Essentially, RISC has been demonstrated to be the optimal processor architecture - CISC makes the silicon too complex, while VLIW/EPIC makes the compilers too complex. Itanium's main success was killing off a lot of better processors than it - Alpha & PA-RISC - while conning SGI into abandoning MIPS for something that didn't save them. MIPS IV is pretty successful in gamers and routers, and the low-power of their latest CPU could make it a contender for tablets if and when they need 64-bit. Power too is an open platform now that even others aside from IBM can adopt.
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