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.
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"
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.
Thursday Jan 11, 2007
Sun Blade X8420 is 1.9x faster than the
best Intel Woodcrest system on SPECint_rate2006 and is also 2.1x faster than the best Intel
Woodcrest on SPECfp_rate2006. The Sun Blade X8420 is also 22% faster than 4-way Itanium2 dual-core on
SPECfp_rate.
Sun Blade X8420 delivered the best result with SPECint_rate2006 score of 93.1, using Solaris 10 and Studio 11 combo. The Sun Blade X8420 also
delivered the best result of of 87.3 for the SPECfp_rate2006
benchmark for all x86 systems.
SPEC CPU2006 Performance Charts (bigger is better, selected recent results)
SPECint_rate2006
| System |
Processors |
Performance Results |
| Type |
GHz |
Chips |
Cores |
Threads |
Peak |
Base |
| Sun Blade X8420 |
AMD Opteron 8220 |
2.8 |
4 |
8 |
8 |
93.1 |
80.4 |
| Fujitsu CELSIUS R640 |
Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest) |
3.0 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
50.3 |
48.8 |
| Sun Ultra 40 M2 |
AMD Opteron 2220SE |
2.8 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
48.8 |
41.9 |
| HP DL585 |
Opteron 854 |
2.8 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
46.9 |
41.4 |
| Supermicro X7DBE |
Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest) |
3.0 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
--- |
45.2 |
| Sun Fire X4200 |
Opteron 285 |
2.6 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
42.8 |
37.8 |
| Fujjitsu RX220 |
Opteron 280 |
2.4 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
40.0 |
35.7 |
| Sun Fire X4200 |
Opteron 256 |
3.0 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
26.4 |
23.1 |
| HP DL585 |
Opteron 854 |
2.8 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
25.2 |
22.3 |
| Dell PrecWork 380 |
Pentium EE |
3.73 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
-- |
23.1 |
| HP DL380 G4 |
Pentium 4 |
3.8 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
-- |
20.9 |
SPECfp_rate2006
| System |
Processors |
Performance Results |
| Type |
GHz |
Chips |
Cores |
Threads |
Peak |
Base |
| Sun Blade X8420 |
AMD Opteron 8220 |
2.8 |
4 |
8 |
8 |
87.3 |
82.5 |
| HP rx6600 |
Itanium2 dual-core |
1.6 |
4 |
8 |
8 |
71.4 |
69.1 |
| HP DL585 |
Opteron 854 |
2.8 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
49.3 |
45.6 |
| FSC CELSIUS R640 |
Intel Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest), WinXP Pro |
3.0 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
42.5 |
41.4 |
| Sun Fire X4200 |
Opteron 285 |
2.6 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
38.1 |
36.0 |
Results as of 09 Jan 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 reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Results from www.spec.org as of 1/9/07.
Sun Blade X8420 (AMD Opteron 8220, 4chips/8cores, Solaris 10) 93.1 SPECint_rate2006.
Sun Blade X8420 (AMD Opteron 8220, 4chips/8cores, Solaris 10) 87.3 SPECint_rate2006.
Results Summary
| Results |
|
X8420 |
|
93.1 SPECint_rate2006 |
|
X8420 |
|
87.3 SPECfp_rate2006 |
| Reference Date: |
|
Jan 09, 2007 |
| System: |
|
Sun Blade X8420, 64GB memory |
| Processors: |
|
four 2.8 GHz Opteron 8220 |
| Software: |
|
Solaris 10, Sun Studio 11 |
Monday Jan 08, 2007
The Sun Fire X4600 M2 delivered world record performance on the
floating-point throughput suite of SPEC CPU2000, for all 4-socket x86
systems. The Sun Fire X4600 M2 beats the IBM p550Q by 6%.
Sun delivered a SPECfp_rate2000 score of 214 using Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 compilers.
For more see the
sun.com X4600 Benchmark Page
SPEC SPECfp_rate2000 Performance Chart (bigger is better)
| System |
Chips |
Cores |
Peak |
Base |
| Sun Fire X4600 M2 (2.8GHz Opteron 2220SE) |
4 |
8 |
214 |
184 |
| IBM System p5 550Q (1650 MHz, 8 CPU) |
4 |
8 |
202 |
189 |
| Sun Blade X8400 (2.6GHz Opteron 885) |
4 |
8 |
182 |
167 |
Benchmark Description
SPEC CPU2000 consists of two suites of benchmarks which test integer
and floating-point performance. Each suite has two different ways of
measuring performance, Speed (often referred to as CPU) and Rate. Speed
results are single threaded performance metrics; Rate results are user
configurable from 1 to N jobs to put a load on the system and the
number of jobs is reported as part of the benchmark report.
Goals of suite: SPEC CPU2000 is
designed to provide performance measurements that can be used to
compare compute-intensive workloads on different computer systems.
Results Summary
| Results |
|
X4600 M2 8-jobs: |
|
214 SPECfp_rate2000 |
| Reference Date: |
| Jan 05, 2007 |
| System: |
|
Sun Fire X4600 M2 |
| Total Number Processors: |
|
4 |
| Processor/GHz of Server: |
|
AMD Opteron 8220SE, 2.8 GHz |
| Operating System: |
|
Solaris 10 6/06 |
| Compiler: |
|
Sun Studio 11 |
Disclosure Statement:
SPEC, SPECfp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Results from
www.spec.org as of Jan 05, 2007.
Sun Fire X4600 M2 (8 cores, 4 chips, Solaris 10), 214 SPECfp_rate2000.
IBM System p5 550Q (1650 MHz, 8 CPU), 202 SPECfp_rate2000.
Tuesday Jan 02, 2007
For performance and solid good code we get the best results from using the
full Sun Studio, but Sun offers GCC for SPARC Systems (Solaris-based UltraSPARC). Fore more info see:
http://cooltools.sunsource.net/gcc/
Developers are telling us they REALLY like to have the frontend
(gcc) that they are accustomed too on Linux available with Sun's
optimizing compiler-backend.
This is a pretty cool stepping stone for those who are unable to immediately take advantage of Sun Studio from front to back.
|
|
|
|
It probably doesn't hurt that the three month avai...