BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Solaris and Sun Studio compiler important to UltraSPARC T2 announcements & benchamrks

Tuesday Aug 07, 2007

Beyond UltraSPARC T2 what other technologies matter? There are two more keys to Sun providing such effective performance in the new single-chip Sun UltraSPARC T2 64-thread processor, that is Solaris (and now of course OpenSolaris) and Sun Studio compilers. Here is a nice slide of the history of hardware history of SPARC, I borrowed this on from an entry in "On the Record" SPARC History from Sun's On the record blog -- blogs.sun.com/ontherecord

An important thing to remember that besides Sun's long history with SPARC, we've also lead the way in parallelism. Over 15 years ago, Solaris supported 64-way SPARC systems and provided near-linear scaling. For those of you old enough to remember, at that time IBM, SGI, HP, and everyone else thought there was no way Sun could produce effective 64-way systems. They were wrong and now our competitors have finally all have introduced systems with lots of processors and/or threads.

Solaris and Sun Studio compilers have a LONG history and lots of experience with industrial-strength applications with lots of threads.

Solaris and Sun Studio compilers were great at scaling to 64-way systems 15 years ago, with a lot more experience and hard work we are even better at scaling and will scale to lots more threads right now. Many thanks to all of those compiler & OS engineers!

Postings on Sun's UltraSPARC T2 performance:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/performance_of_the_new_sun
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/ultrasparc_t2_more_floating_point
http://blogs.sun.com/sprack/entry/ultrasparc_t2_world_class_crypto
OpenSPARC T2:
http://blogs.sun.com/d/entry/ultrasparc_t2_documentation_available

...I've focused on Solaris, but there are options, for example Ubuntu. Ubuntu has already booted on the UltraSPARC T2.

As as a reminder Ubuntu and Canonical proved it on an UltraSPARC T1 almost 14 months ago, see this article on that work.

[2] Comments
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Posted at 04:02PM Aug 07, 2007 in Benchmarks
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i think no one will really remember the t2 in the future, and that's a good thing. what i see sun doing with this chip is creating chips to have x cores with y threads. the t2 is just one possible combination. obviously the product shipped still has to have a definite number of cores and threads but i can see sun in 10 years offering servers with a t8 chipset whereby you can freely select the number of processors, cores and threads you want. in other words, chips are making the transition from playmobil to lego.

Posted by howlingmadhowie on August 08, 2007 at 12:31 AM PDT #

I will likely agree, the T1 will be remembered for changing the rules, and starting the direction for lots of cores and threads (8, 32 resp.). Right now the demand for T1 is rapidly growing. I think the T2 will be remembered as the one of many that followed that really drove home the market success of the need to break from the archaic idea of 'performance per core' is the only thing that matter.

Posted by BM Seer on August 08, 2007 at 09:48 AM PDT #

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