BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Can I use 64 threads in a chip?

Wednesday Aug 08, 2007

Can someone really use 64-threads in a chip? The answer is simple, when you look out into your datacenter do you see racks of servers or just a single naked core sitting alone in the back corner? :)

If you see racks of server you are running lots and lots of threads. Think of it his way, if you have a bunch of dual-core single-socket 1RU servers filling a rack you have around 80 threads in a rack, or 2-socket you have 160, or quad-core 2-socket you have 320 threads.

Now how would you judge performance of a single rack (with 80-320 threads)? Would you run one copy of "gzip" or "tar" and compare that to your laptop and say that rack is slow, of course not., You'd run a whole bunch of them.

So when you are performance testing an UltraSPARC T1 or UltraSPARC T2 server throw lots of work at it and it will have no problem. There is massive parallelism in every datacenter with racks of servers. Perfect for UltraSPARC T1/T2. Every datacenter with web-tiers, application-tiers, and database behind those tiers runs tons of threads. And remember the UltraSPARC T1 and introduction and even last week continues to set leading performance records at every tier.

Intelligence test :) Would you judge performance of an UltraSPARC T2 by running a single "gzip" or "tar"?

[2] Comments
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Posted at 04:00PM Aug 08, 2007 in Misc
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SAP-SD benchmarks:

9330 SAPS 2-way Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5355 2.66 GHz
http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert4207.pdf

5120 SAPS 2 processors / 4 cores / 4 threads, Intel Xeon 5160 3 GHz
http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert3107.pdf

This is performance !?
4780 SAPS Sun Fire Model T2000, 1 processor / 8 cores
http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert4705.pdf

Posted by Triffids on August 09, 2007 at 03:26 AM PDT #

You gave me so much to comment, I created the following 9-Aug-07 posting:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/ultrasparc_t2_and_old_ultrasparc

Posted by BM Seer on August 09, 2007 at 09:22 AM PDT #

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