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

update: Solaris beating Linux Performance

Wednesday Jan 03, 2007

(Update with corrections of previous entry)

Sun Fire X4100/X4200M2 4-thread 2-socket World Record, shows that Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 are faster than Opterons running Linux (31% faster than PGI and 8% faster than Pathscale compilers). The Sun Fire X4100/X4200M2 two-way dual-core server produced best SPECompM2001 result of 13222.

Sun Solaris 10/Studio11 was 31% faster than Linux/PGI with AMD Tyan system using SuSE Linux SLES9 SP3 64-bit/PGI 6.2-4. The AMD Tyan even used faster CL4 DIMMs. Both results submitted Nov 2006. The Sun Fire X4100/X4200M2 also topped the IBM p5 520 POWER5+ 1.9GHz AIX5L V5.3 result by 61%.

Solaris/Studio 11 is 8% faster than Linux SuSE SLES9 SP3 64bit using QLogic PathScale Compiler Suite v2.5.

There is a growing body of favorable comparisons showing Solaris advantages over Linux on performance. Remember the previous BM Seer posting on Java performance.

Even more examples of Solaris beating Linux coming soon.

SPECompM2001 Results (bigger is better)

SPECompM2001	Cores	Chips	Thrds	System
13222	4	2	4	Sun Fire X4100/X4200 M2, Opteron 2220SE, 2.8GHz
12574	4	2	4	Sun Fire X2200 M2, Opteron 2218, 2.6GHz
12172	4	2	4	AMD Tyan n6650w, Opteron 8220, 2.8GHz
10085	4	2	4	AMD Tyan n6650w, Opteron 8220, 2.8GHz
8174	2	1	4	IBM System p5 520 (1900 MHz, 2 CPU)

Benchmark Description

The SPEC OMPM2001 Benchmark Suite was released in June 2001 and tests HPC performance using OpenMP for parallelism. It consists of 11 programs (8 in Fortran and 3 in C) parallelized using OpenMP API.

Goals of the benchmark:

Targeted to mid-range (4-32 processor) parallel systems

Run rules, tools and reporting similar to SPEC CPU2000

Programs representative of HPC and Scientific Applications

See Also:
SPEC OMP2001 Page
sun.com X4100 Benchmark Page
sun.com X4200 Benchmark Page

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPEComp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org Results as of Jan 2, 2007. Sun Fire X4100/X4200 M2 (4 cores, 2 chips, 4 threads), 13,222 SPECompM2001. AMD Tyan n6650w (4 cores, 2 chips, 4 threads), 10,085 SPECompM2001 PGI compiler. AMD Tyan n6650w (4 cores, 2 chips, 4 threads), 12,172 SPECompM2001 Pathscale compiler. Sockets refers to chips.

Results Summary

	X4100/X4200 M2 4-threads:		13222 SPECompM2001
	X2200 M2 4-threads:		12574 SPECompM2001
Reference Date:			Oct 16, 2006
System:			Sun Fire X4100/X4200M2 16GB memory (4x2GB per chip), DDR667
Processors:			two Opteron 2220SE, 2.8 GHz
Operating System:			Solaris 10
Compiler:			Sun Studio 11

Solaris again beating Linux on benchmark

Wednesday Dec 20, 2006

This entry has been updated, for the latest please go to:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/update_solaris_beating_linux_performance.