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Is the Sparc T4 Too Little Too Late?

Posted by Unknown on from the intel-crushes-all dept.

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."

6 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Old news by sunderland56 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Isn't this a repeat from yesterday?

    Or are we going to see this story once per core?

    1. Re:Old news by monkeyhybrid · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yesterday's was the final T4 post, but it's out of order.

  2. car analogy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:car analogy by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I agree with the I/O. I worked at a large research centre with a 3000 tape LTO 4 library and 200TB (about 20 RAID arrays) disk SAN attached to one 2 socket T2 machine. The machine didn't even budge when recovering from a couple tapes, backing up to another 3, and pumping out 10Gbps to userland. It just gobbled up NFS traffic like crazy because it had 128 concurrent threads of capacity. Even Intels high end chip only has 20 and Intel gets all excited about it but the Sparc has had 64 for 4+ years. Maybe it isn't so great with database load, I'm not sure but it kicked but as a fileserver.

  3. Ignorant article by John+Bayko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Ignorant article by turgid · · Score: 5, Informative

      Sun's first out-of-order execution CPU was code named Millennium and was due out in y2k but it was late. They canceled the project in 2005. It was going to be called UltraSPARC V. Rumour has it that it was going to have a mode without register windows as well to further increase performance.

      None of the Sun UltraSPARC CPUs (I, II, IIi, III, IIIi, IV, IV+) had ooo.

      Sun just couldn't get ooo to work. Fujitsu had no problem, on the other hand. Their SPARC64 CPUs were miles better at the same clock frequency and went to higher frequencies too. Sun always made sure that you always got the last generation version of Solaris when you bought a Fujitsu box to make the Sun boxes more compelling.

      Sun then gave up on "conventional" CPU design and went for the highly multi-threaded designs that they bought in from Afara (formed by ex-Sun staffers) and the Rock which turned out to be a dud. There was a good article about that after Oracle bought out Sun explaining why it wasn't a good design but I can't find the link.

      So Sun did a deal with Fujitsu to re-badge their SPARC64 boxes with the latest Solaris on them...

      I've no doubt that the T4 will be very good for certain loads. I know that my current employer bought a couple of T2 boxes as ClearCase view servers a few years back and the performance was abysmal since ClearCase doesn't scale well on multi-threaded systems. They had to be reassigned and replaced by M-series boxes with the (more conventional) Fujitsu SPARC64 CPUs.

      And I'm very angry with what Oracle has done with Solaris 11 licensing. I've got a pile of old Sun workstations for playing with that have now become landfill. Oh well, my Solais skills can rot. It's Linux all the way now.

      --
      Stick Men