"Estimated" what does that mean for Sun's UltraSPARC T2
Wednesday Aug 08, 2007
Why does Sun designate yesterday's performance results as "estimates", why that word? Did some Sun marketeer just throw a dart and just pick a big number. No. All UltraSPARC T2 SPEC CPU and SPEC OMP metrics quoted are from full “reportable” runs, but are nevertheless designated as “estimates” because they use pre-production systems. Sun customer systems, to be announced later, are expected to perform similarly. SPEC rules do allow comparing these preliminary scores and published result.
Is Sun the only vendor to use this clause? No. Intel and AMD have made
a long history of using preliminary numbers at chip announcements to get
the word out about their performance. Sun is just following their lead,
and trumping their performance 
Ok, back to why the word "estimates?" The SPEC CPU committee voted to use that specific word for preliminary scores. Members include IBM, Intel, AMD, HP, .... And every employee of a member company must follow the rules.
- By license agreement, SPEC members and customers agree to run and report results as specified in each benchmark suite's documentation.
from SPEC FAQ
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
Ubunu (aready booted on UltraSPARC T2):
Ubuntu & Canonical & UltraSPARC T1 (May06).
As a Sun employee I try my best to follow every rule when talking about results in public, but I'm an engineer so sometimes it is hard to follow all the legalese so I try to correct things as soon as I see an error. And I do my best to remind other Sun bloggers to put in the proper disclosure statement for SPEC & TPC benchmark results. Though quite honestly I wish SPEC & TPC would streamline the rules, make them more consistent, and minimize the lengthy disclosure statements.
Of course because Sun is in the lead and because I made some suggestions, I'm sure this entry will be fully scrutinized by every competitor. If I made errors let me know in the comments and I will correct them.
Disclosure Statement
SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp, and SPEComp registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of August 6, 2007. Actually this one is short because I didn't put any specific results in this posting, the ones at the links have the more extensive disclosures because they show scores & results.
|
|
|
|
Tags: cmt compilers cryptography hpc opensolaris opensource performance solaris sparc studio t2 t5120 t5220 ultrasparc
It probably doesn't hurt that the three month avai...