Fujitsu Announces 16-core SPARC64 IXfx (and the Supercomputer It Powers)

First time accepted submitter A12m0v writes with a link to Fujitsu's announcement of its next generation of supercomputer, from which he pastes: "PRIMEHPC FX10 runs on the newly-developed SPARC64 IXfx processors, which offer a very significant boost in performance over the SPARC64 VIIIfx processor on which they are based and which power the K computer. Each processor has 16 cores and achieves world-class standalone performance levels of 236.5 gigaflops and performance per watt of over 2 gigaflops." Not that K is any slouch.

Comments

Re:Oracle?

[TheRaven64]

I don't think Oracle is interested in this market. They wanted the subset of Sun hardware that is good for databases and web apps (i.e. the Tx line), but they aren't really interested in being in the general-purpose server market. They want to be able to control the entire stack from the hardware to the applications, and everything in the middle. There are two reasons for this. The obvious one is that it lets them really tune for performance out of the box. The second, and more important, is that it lets them offer support contracts for the entire machine. If anything goes wrong with it, hardware, operating system, database, or in the business apps, you won't get your in-house IT staff to fix it, you'll just call Oracle. These contracts can be really expensive, and still seem like a good deal compared to keeping a few admins on staff.

Re:Oracle?

[sleigher]

Right, except have you ever called Oracle support? Had a sev 1 recently. We have 24x7x4 hr call back. Did I get a call back after 4 hours? no. 6 hours? no. 8 hours? no. It was 3 days later we actually got a manager to have a meeting with us to figure out why we can't get support for our hardware. Go ahead, get rid of your staff. Depend on Oracle to help you. That's a great idea. I assure you, you will not regret it.

Re:I wish someone would put sparc on the desktop

[TheRaven64]

I have one of Sun's cheap workstations - the Blade 100, which was 100% cheap commodity crap plus an UltraSPARC CPU. The problem is that they don't have anything like the economies of scale required to make cheap chips. If Intel is selling 100 chips for every one that Sun is selling (which is quite optimistic for Sun / Oracle), then the unit cost of the SPARC is going to be a lot bigger, even if the two chips are the same size and made on the same process, just because all of the one-off costs (including R&D) are spread over a much smaller number of chips. A cheap Sun workstation is still likely to be a few hundred dollars more than an equivalent x86 system, even if all of the components other than the CPU are the same, and that limits them to people who really need to be able to develop on SPARC...