OpenSPARC & China

Thursday Feb 28, 2008

"Sun and Ministry of Education for the People's Republic of China Announce Landmark Agreement Based on Sun's OpenSPARC Technology"

MOE Selected OpenSPARC for Its World Record Performance and Because It's the Industry's Only Open Source, Multicore, Multithreaded Processor Architecture

See the press release at:
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080227/20080227005287.html

Can I use 64 threads in a chip?

Wednesday Aug 08, 2007

Can someone really use 64-threads in a chip? The answer is simple, when you look out into your datacenter do you see racks of servers or just a single naked core sitting alone in the back corner?

If you see racks of server you are running lots and lots of threads. Think of it his way, if you have a bunch of dual-core single-socket 1RU servers filling a rack you have around 80 threads in a rack, or 2-socket you have 160, or quad-core 2-socket you have 320 threads.

Now how would you judge performance of a single rack (with 80-320 threads)? Would you run one copy of "gzip" or "tar" and compare that to your laptop and say that rack is slow, of course not., You'd run a whole bunch of them.

So when you are performance testing an UltraSPARC T1 or UltraSPARC T2 server throw lots of work at it and it will have no problem. There is massive parallelism in every datacenter with racks of servers. Perfect for UltraSPARC T1/T2. Every datacenter with web-tiers, application-tiers, and database behind those tiers runs tons of threads. And remember the UltraSPARC T1 and introduction and even last week continues to set leading performance records at every tier.

Intelligence test Would you judge performance of an UltraSPARC T2 by running a single "gzip" or "tar"?

UltraSPARC T2: more floating-point performance

Tuesday Aug 07, 2007

More about floating-point on the Sun UltraSPARC T2 in this posting, In the previous posting SPECfp_2006 scores and the UltraSPARC T2 design being open-sourced were discussed.

In the UltraSPARC T2 there are eight floating-point units that are well suited for scientific applications. Based upon preliminary runs the Sun UltraSPARC T2 processor at 1.4 GHz beats all single chip scores showing 14230(est)/15081(est) SPECompMbase2001/SPECompMpeak2001.

How do these preliminary runs (we must use the term "estimated" by SPEC rules) compare to SPECompMbase2001/SPECompMpeak2001 scores?

• These Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz processor scores beat the best single-chip IBM p520 POWER5+ 1.9GHz processor published result by 85%.
• ...Sun is waiting for POWER6 4.7GHz results, maybe UltraSPARC T2 results will scare IBM from ever publishing a single-chip result?

Benchmark description:

The SpecOMP benchmark is a test of the performance of 9 High Performance computing applications. It is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers. All C/C++ and FORTRAN applications in this suite use the OpenMP programming model that provides a portable, scalable model for developing parallel applications for platforms ranging from the desktop to the supercomputer.

The OpenMP Application Program Interface (API) supports multi-platform shared-memory parallel programming in C/C++ and Fortran on all architectures, from the largest Unix servers to the small Windows NT platforms.

Disclosure statement:

All UltraSPARC T2 SPEC CPU metrics quoted are from full “reportable” runs, but are nevertheless designated as “estimates” because they use preproduction systems. SPEC, and SPEComp registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz (1 chip, 8 cores, 64 threads) 14230 (est)/ 15081 (est) SPECompMbase2001/SPECompMpeak2001. Competitive results from www.spec.org as of August 6, 2007. IBM p520 1.9GHz (1 chip, 2 cores, 4 threads) published 8141/8174 SPECompMbase2001/SPECompMpeak2001.

Performance of the new Sun UltraSPARC T2

Tuesday Aug 07, 2007

Sun UltraSPARC T2 is an amazing chip and very fast! The UltraSPARC T2 features several industry firsts:

• Eight cores and 64 threads
• Integrated 10 GbE networking and I/O
• Dedicated, cryptographic and floating point units per core
• 10 cryptographic functions supported with hardware
• open-source design: www.opensparc.net

Based upon preliminary runs, the Sun UltraSPARC T2 processor at 1.4 GHz, beat all single chip scores showing 78.3 est. SPECint_rate2006. How do these preliminary runs (we must use the term "estimated" by SPEC rules) compare to SPECint_rate2006 results.

• These Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz processor scores beat the best single-chip IBM POWER6 4.7GHz processor published result by 29%.
• These Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz processor scores beat the best single-chip estimated scores of the AMD Barcelona by 23%.
• These Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz processor scores beat the best single-chip published scores of the 2.66GHz Intel X5355 (Clovertown) by 48%.

Based upon preliminary runs, the Sun UltraSPARC T2 processor at 1.4 GHz, beat all single chip scores showing 62.3 est. SPECfp_rate2006. How do these preliminary runs (we must use the term "estimated" by SPEC rules) compare to SPECfp_rate2006 results.

• These Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz processor scores beat the best published single-chip IBM POWER6 4.7GHz processor result by 7%.
• These Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz processor scores beat the best single-chip estimated scores of the AMD Barcelona by 11%.
• These Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz processor scores beat the best single-chip published scores of the 2.66GHz Intel X5355 (Clovertown) by 66%.

Performance per core doesn't matter GHz doesn't matter, what matters is numbers of cores, efficiency, and design of the chip! Competitors are saying that UltraSPARC T2 is proprietary... this makes no sense. both UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 are open source designs (www.opensparc.net). You do not find the latest design of Intel, AMD, or IBM as open source designs.

Disclosure Statement:

All Sun UltraSPARC T2 SPEC CPU metrics quoted are from full “reportable” runs, but are nevertheless designated as “estimates” because they use preproduction systems. SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4GHz (1 chip, 8 cores, 64 threads) 78.3 est. SPECint_rate2006, 62.3 est. SPECfp_rate2006. Competitive results from www.spec.org as of August 6, 2007. IBM POWER6 4.7GHz (1 chip, 2 cores, 4 threads) 60.9. SPECint_rate2006, 58.0 SPECfp_rate2006. AMD Barcelona 2.6 GHz (1 chip, 4 cores, 4 threads) 63.9 est SPECint_rate2006, 56.3 est. SPECfp_rate2006. Barcelona estimates based upon "The Register" article stating 2.6GHz quad is 21% and 50% faster than Intel 2.66 system. Fujitsu RX300 Intel X5355 2.66 GHz (1 chip, 4 cores, 4 threads) 52.8 SPECint_rate2006, 47.5 SPECfp_rate2006.

Reminder: The Niagara 2 score was obtained from a full "reportable" SPEC run, but is designated as an "estimate" because a pre-production system was used.

...more information on the UltraSPARC T2 later today.