BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Sun Blade X6250 & Sun Studio 12 x86 World Record

Wednesday Jun 13, 2007

Sun Blade X6250 Delivers a pair of x86 SPEC CPU2006 integer performance World Records:

Sun Blade X6250 (Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5160) and running Solaris 10 and using Sun Studio 12 compiler delivered the best x86 result for the SPECint2006 benchmark.

Sun Blade X6250 (Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5160) using Solaris 10 and Studio 12, delivered x86 4-core world record on SPECint_rate2006.

Sun Blade X6250 server had a SPECint2006 result of 21.0 and SPECint_rate2006 result of 65.0. The advanced features of freely available Sun Studio 12 complier were critical for getting this level of performance on the Sun Blade 6250.

The Sun Blade X6250 is only 3% slower than the peak score of the very-expensive new IBM POWER6 p570, which was recently announced. SPECint2006 is a single job stream. So let's now turn to comparing 4 thread results, in this case the Sun Blade X6250 is 7% faster than the peak SPECint_rate2006 score of he very-expensive new IBM POWER6 p570 (both IBM and Sun at 4 threads). Oh, and remember that anymore clock rate is not how you compare systems the Sun Blade X6250 is at 3GHz and the IBM POWER6 is at 4.7GHz. CPU frequency is basically irrelevant, it is CPU and system architecture that matters!

SPEC CPU2006 Landscape - bigger is better, selected recent results

SPECint2006

System Processors Performance Results
Type GHz Chips Cores Peak Base
IBM p570 (power6) Power6 4.7 1 1 21.6 17.8
Sun Blade X6250 Intel Xeon 5160 3.0 2 4 21.0
Supermicro X7DB8+ board Intel Xeon 5160 3.0 2 4 20.8 18.9
Sun Ultra 40 M2 AMD Opteron 2222SE 3.0 2 4 16.1

SPECint_rate2006

System Processors Performance Results
Type GHz Chips Cores Threads
/ Copies		 Peak Base
Sun Blade X6250 Intel Xeon 5160 3.0 2 4 4 65.0
Supermicro X7DB8+ Intel Xeon 5160 3.0 2 4 4 64.9 60.0
IBM p570 (Power6) Power6 4.7 1 2 4 60.9 53.2
Sun Ultra 40 M2 AMD Opteron 2222SE 3.0 2 4 4 60.4
Fujitsu BX620 S3 Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest) 3.0 2 4 4 59.4 56.7

Results as of 06 Jun 2007 from www.spec.org.

Benchmark Description

SPEC CPU2006 is made up of two suites of benchmarks, CFP2006 and CINT2006. CFP2006 targets floating-point performance, while CINT2006 targets integer performance.

Each suite has two different measures. First is the CPU measure, which is the performance on the suite as a single stream. This can be either a single thread or automatic compiled parallel run. This measure is further defined by base and optimized runs. Base uses the same compiler flags for all kernels, where optimized is allowed to use different compiler flags for each kernel. Results are compared against a baseline system run that was standardized by SPEC.

The second measure is Rate. It is a measure of how many CPU measures can be run at a time. Typically, it is run as n processes on n processors. It shows how well the same job mix can run on a system under some load. It also is run as a base and optimized set of results.

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org or from IBM public websites as of 6/06/07. Sun Blade X6250 (Intel Xeon 5160, 2chips/4cores, Solaris 10) 65.0 SPECint_rate2006; Sun Blade X6250 (Intel Xeon 5160, 2chips/4cores, Solaris 10) 21.0 SPECint2006; IBM System p 570 (POWER6, 1chip/1core, AIX 5L v5.3) 21.6 SPECint2006; IBM System p 570 (POWER6, 4 theads, 1chip/2cores, AIX 5L v5.3) 60.9 SPECint_rate2006.

System Configuration

Results
Reference Date: Jun 06, 2007
System: Sun Blade X6250
SPEED: 16GB memory 8x2GB
RATE : 32GB memory 8x4GB
X6250 21.0 SPECint2006
X6250 65.0 SPECint_rate2006
Total Number Processors: 2 x Intel Xeon 5160
Software: Solaris 10 11/06, Sun Studio 12 Compiler, MicroQuill's SmartHeap Library v7.4

See Also

  • All Benchmark results on Sun Blade 6000 Blade Server

    • [4] Comments
    Like this post? del.icio.us | furl | slashdot | technorati | digg
    Posted at 10:08AM Jun 13, 2007 in Benchmarks
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    Comments:

    Where are the base figures for Sun and IBM?

    Posted by rick jones on June 13, 2007 at 02:24 PM PDT #

    From what I can see from IBM and Sun public info, these are the only part of the results that have been made public. Both of these results seem submitted to SPEC, so I imagine it will be a few days or a week or so before we see the rest of the documentation appearing on www.spec.org

    Posted by BM Seer on June 13, 2007 at 02:34 PM PDT #

    For someone so fixated on the IBM Power6 stuff I'm surprised you haven't dug deeper: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/system_perf.html As for the Sun figures, surely you must have access to those. Finally, while the wording is a bit difficult to follow, SPEC has something of an "in for a penny, in for a pound" rule when it comes to benchmarks a vendor makes public before completion of review: http://www.spec.org/osg/policy.html#B.7.0 second paragraph

    Posted by rick jones on June 14, 2007 at 08:20 AM PDT #

    I've updated the IBM info to include base, sorry missed this URL. I could probably find the person who has the Sun SPEC info, but I don't think it has been publicly disclosed. I only use public data as I am not any kind of official announcement mechanism and definitely not a Marketing guy.

    Posted by BM Seer on June 14, 2007 at 01:27 PM PDT #

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