news trickles out on Niagara2

Friday Aug 03, 2007

News is starting to trickle out on Niagara2. Sun continues to do revolutionary things that will have huge effect on how we compute. For what has leaked so far see: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/08/suns_niagara_2.html

At OpenSPARC.net you will find a in-depth presentation of the upcoming Niagara 2 processor: "An 8-core, 64-thread, 64-bit, power efficient SPARC SoC (Niagara2)". The presentation was held at the International Solid State Circuits Conference 2007.

So the question becomes how do we now judge performance of chips with different architectures? One thing that hasn't changed is system performance and system cost. Look at what a system costs compare it against other systems in the same price range.

The computer industry can no longer determine performance based on old dinosaur habits. Remember when vendors determined all performance by GHz. Then remember back in '04 when Intel quite naming processors by GHz... they realized that GHz is only part of the overall equation for processor performance. What does that equation look like in very rough terms?

performance = GHz * number-of-cores * number-of-threads-per-core * efficiency-of-design * other * software efficiency

...so if you compare performance between different designs by any of these factors alone (example: perf/core, perf/Ghz, perf/thread) you are being very misleading!

Case in point, IBM loves to talk about perf/core, but they avoid telling everyone that they lead the industry, by several factors in price/core!

The IT jungle says: "340,000. It costs $17,700 to activate a core, so pushing it to eight cores costs another $141,600." So on a per core basis that means POWER6 costs $60,000/core. Actually I've estimated that in a system with memory an IBM power6 system costs $65K/core to $130K/core! Any customer needs to do their own pricing.

So comparing systems of dramatically different cost-per-core on a per-core basis NO LONGER MAKES ANY SENSE! No wonder IBM wants to stilt comparisons and avoid pricing! The only other clues on list price on power6 is here.

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Posted at 10:00AM Aug 03, 2007 in Misc
Tags: niagara performance t1 t2000 ultrasparc