BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

UltraSPARC T2 World-Record Single-chip SPECint_rate2006

Wednesday Jan 09, 2008

Sun has set a single-chip SPECint_rate2006 world record using the gccfss compiler from Sun. For other benchmarks that show single-chip UltraSPARC T2 beating multi-chip servers see: http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5220/benchmarks.jsp & http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5120/benchmarks.jsp

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server, running at 1.4 GHz, delivered a world record single chip result of 83.2 SPECint_rate2006.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 using the GCC for SPARC Systems (gccfss) compiler topped all competitor's single chip results including beating the IBM p570 single-chip 4.7 GHZ POWER6 result by 37%. IBM used its proprietary compiler, XL C/C++.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 using the GCC for SPARC Systems (gccfss) compiler beat the performance of the HP DL360 G5 with a single chip quad-core 3.16GHz Xeon X5460 by 14%.

The gccfss compiler allows one to use the optimal Sun SPARC optimization tools along with the popular gcc coding conventions and deliver performance that has not been possible before without time consuming code changes. For more information on gccfss and how to get it, go to http://cooltools.sunsource.net/gcc/.

SPECint_rate2006 selected Performance (bigger is better)

System Processors Performance Results
Type GHz Chips Cores Threads Peak Base
T5220 (gccfss 4.2) UltraSPARC T2 1.4 1 8 64 83.2 75.6
T5120/T5220 UltraSPARC T2 1.4 1 8 64 78.5 73.0
T5220 (gccfss) UltraSPARC T2 1.4 1 8 64 78.0 71.6
Asus P5E3 Intel QX9650 3.0 1 4 4 76.7 69.0
HP DL360 G5 Intel X5460 3.16 1 4 4 73.0 62.1
Asus P5E3 Intel QX6850 3.0 1 4 4 69.1 64.9
T5120/T5220 UltraSPARC T2 1.2 1 8 64 68.9 est 63.8 est
Dell T3400 Intel QX9650 3.0 1 4 4 68.8 61.4
IBM p 570 Power6 4.7 1 2 4 60.9 53.2
Fujitsu RX100 Intel X3210 2.13 1 4 4 54.4 48.0

Benchmark Description

SPEC CPU2006 has two basic measures:

  • "Rate" - system performance of CPUs, memory, compiler
  • "Speed" - single-thread performance; not intended to understand multi-core designs

The strategic metrics include:

  • SPECint_rate2006: throughput for 12 integer benchmarks derived from real applications such as perl, gcc, XML processing, and pathfinding
  • SPECfp_rate2006: throughput for 17 floating point benchmarks derived from real applications, including chemistry, physics, genetics, and weather.

There are "base" variants of both the above metrics that require more conservative compilation, such as using the same flags for all benchmarks.

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPECint reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Sun result submitted to SPEC, other results from www.spec.org as of 1/8/08. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 gccfss (UltraSPARC T2, 1 chip, 8 cores), 83.2 SPECint_rate2006. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 (UltraSPARC T2, 1 chip, 8 cores), 78.5 SPECint_rate2006. IBM p570 (POWER6, 1 chip, 2 cores), 60.9 SPECint_rate2006. HP DL360 G5 (Xeon X5460, 1 chip, 4 cores), 73.0 SPECint_rate2006.

Sun Configuration Details

Results
Reference Date: Jan 7, 2008
System: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220
Processor: Sun UltraSPARC T2, 1.4 GHz
  83.2 SPECint_rate2006
Software: Solaris 10, Sun Studio 12 Compiler gccfss

[5] Comments
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Posted at 09:00AM Jan 09, 2008 in Benchmarks
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Comments:

Congratulations; 10% better performance than Intel at 10x the price.

Posted by Wes Felter (IBM Research) on January 09, 2008 at 11:37 AM PST #

oh, you know that US T2 beats 4-socket QC Intel on other benchmarks on perf, power-perf, and $/perf.

Also you forget that the US T2 beats the very expensive POWER6. Why don't you share the price of an IBM p570 4.7GHz 4-core 64GB system?

Posted by BM Seer on January 09, 2008 at 11:48 AM PST #

(teaser warning) Check back tomorrow to see US T2 compared to IBM power6 4.7GHz: Sun has much better perf and a lot less cost on same ISV benchmark than IBM.

Posted by BM Seer on January 09, 2008 at 02:12 PM PST #

it would be educational to have a $ price column. SPEC usually provides one. it seems a little disengenious of both of you (Wes, BM) not to back your horses on this point. Particularly for SPEC CPU. Links to the SPEC submissions would be handy too.

Posted by rnc on January 10, 2008 at 05:00 AM PST #

WRT the 1.2GHz T5120/T5220 estimates, while it isn't clear that SPEC _requires_ it, some statement as to how you/Sun arrived at the estimate is encouraged.

Also, it looks like Jan 9 was a busy day for you, also "updating" the T6320 SPECcpu numbers in:

http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/tags/t6320 etc

to deal with the initial submittals getting marked non-compliant for not meeting the three month availability window. However, those new numbers don't appear when one searches for T6230 results on www.spec.org as of this writing, and your blog updates don't say anything about them being submitted to/under review by SPEC - are the updated results being submitted to SPEC with updated availability dates?

Posted by rick jones on January 15, 2008 at 08:56 AM PST #

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