David Patterson(UC Berkeley) on UltraSPARC T2

Thursday Sep 20, 2007

In a video, Prof. David Patterson opines on UltraSPARC T2 and how Sun's CMT has some very fresh ideas to move the industry forward on practical computing. He talks about the Old-fashioned and out-dated concepts of "peak" or "clock speed" and the need to look at delivered performance. here, here!!!

He shows that the UltraSPARC T2 out of box is almost 1.5x to 2x faster than Clovertown(quad-core) & Opteron and three to four times the watt/performance advantage. In addition, he says the UltraSPARC T2 is the easiest to program and auto-tune.

He did conceded that if you look at the archaic (he used the word "old-fashioned") 20th century metrics of peak and clock that the UltraSPARC T2 is 2x to 7x slower -- but he (like I) focus on delivered performance.

David Patterson is a Professor in Computer Science at Univ of California Berkeley. David and John Hennessy (Stanford University) wrote the textbook "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach Fourth Edition"

AFTERNOTE #1

To respond the the comment below (comments are now closed). I'm sure the professor will give us more details and comparison of floating-point performance on important applications between the UltraSPARC T2 and the various X64 architectures, he's very complete and thoughtful.

In terms of other comparisons. There are cpu benchmarks (int & fp) comparisons that were done at UltraSPARC T2 launch, best chip in several comparisons. There will probably be more even results before long on commercial benchmarks.

A nice summary of the video is at: blogs.sun.com/geetha/entry/berkeley_view

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Posted at 08:00AM Sep 20, 2007 in Benchmarks
Tags: cmt performance sparc t2 t5120 t5220 ultrasparc