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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.
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.
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"
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.
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 ----
Linux isn't restricted to the x86. It will run fine on Alpha, PA-RISC, MIPS, Itanium, PowerPC, POWER, and most likely the T4 (it runs on pretty much every other SPARC out there). There are various flavors of BSD that will run on all of those platforms as well, including many others.
The question becomes why you'd want to run Linux on any of these. Or perhaps, why a hardware manufacturer would want to encourage you to run Linux on one of these. It might make sense to buy a high-end POWER based system to run a lot of virtualized Linux instances, I suppose, but running Linux directly on the hardware gains you no advantage over running IBM's software. When you get into minicomputer territory, Linux doesn't cut it.
For workstation use, Linux (and BSD, for that matter) is great, and probably better than the native software for most of these platforms. It's a good platform for servers. Linux runs circles around Solaris, for instance, when you're talking small/medium server and workstation applications.
Linux and BSD can't do what OS/400 (or IBM i or whatever) can do. They can't keep up with Solaris on really huge setups. They're just not designed for those uses, and it would be a huge waste of money to buy that kind of hardware and not use software that can make full use of it.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.