BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Sun UltraSPARC T2 & IBM Power6 comparison blogged about

Wednesday Aug 29, 2007

There is more preliminary UltraSPARC T2 performance is blogged about at: http://blogs.sun.com/jmeyer/entry/power6_goes_thud_part_v

Where John states:

    And IBM knows that next quarter, Sun will be introducing systems based on the new UltraSPARC T2, the world's first true system-on-a-chip and the world's fastest microprocessor. Preliminary estimates on one popular benchmark show that a single rack of UltraSPARC T2-based systems will outperform four racks of 4.7GHz POWER6-based p5 570s (more on that as we get closer to system announcement). No kidding.
I haven't seen this internal info yet, but I'll try to dig it up. Looking at other tests, I believe this one.

...John also talks more about the lagging IBM POWER6 rollout.

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Posted at 01:35PM Aug 29, 2007 in Benchmark Issues
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UltraSPARC T2, and Old UltraSPARC T1 world records & new Xeon's

Thursday Aug 09, 2007

Postscript:

Be careful when comparing performance results, as an example look at a comment in yesterday's "Can I use 64 threads in a chip?" posting. At least this comment pointed out that you can use 4-8 threads in 2 chip Intel-based systems, but it was really trying to be a stab at UltraSPARC Performance. Here was the comment: One really needs to look at the complete data on those .pdf's to make a fair comparison (also in the disclosure statement below).

  • First: The T2000 SAP-SD used a 1.2GHz UltraSPARC T1, Sun now ships faster 1.4GHz UltraSPARC T1, and has announced 1.4GHz UltraSPARC T2. The 1.4GHz T2 has double the threads of that 1.4GHz (double the computational power).
  • Second: The T2000 SAP-SD result was submitted in Dec 2005, at that time it was near the performance of the expensive 4-way POWER5 IBM p550.
  • Third: The 2-chip Dual-core Xeon SAP-SD result above was submitted 18 months after the T2000 SAP-SD result.
  • Fourth: Different versions of the benchmark. The 2-chip Dual-core Xeon was run with ECC 6.0 (not SAP 5.0). The a newer version of the benchmark takes more computational work to produce the same results. Dual-core SAP-SD result was also run with Solaris 10 on Xeon, how cool is that!
  • Fifth: The 2-chip quad-core Xeon SAP-SD result above was submitted 19 months after the T2000 SAP-SD result.
  • Sixth: The Sun result used open-source MySQL MaxDB database, how cool is that! The Xeon results used Oracle or MicroSoft SQL Server.
      postscript:
      Sun latter used Oracle, others suggested US T1 has some sort of silly database limitation - NOT TRUE!

    You'll see more results soon.

    Triffids, as a reminder if you work for a partner company of SAP you must put the following disclosures when you post results. If you are not they you don't need to put this in, but as you can see the data in it would have allowed you to make a better comparison of systems. Don't worry I'm not asking you to identify yourself at all.

    Disclosure Statement:

    Two-tier SAP ECC 5.0 Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark Sun Fire T2000 (1-way, 1 proc, 8 cores, 32 threads) 1x 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1, 32 GB mem, 950 SD benchmark users, 1.91 sec avg response time, Cert#2005047., MaxDB 7.5 database, Solaris 10; Two-tier SAP ECC 5.0 Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark IBM System eServer p5 550 (4-way, 4 procs, 4 cores, 8 threads) 4x 1.9 GHz POWER5+, 32GB mem, 1,000 SD benchmark users, 1.97s avg resp time, Cert#2005040, IBM DB2 Universal Database 8.2.2, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9; Two-tier SAP ECC 6.0 Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY Model BFi20 S2 (2 procs, 4 cores, 4 threads) 2x Intel Xeon 5160, 3.0 GHz, 16GB mem, 1,020 SD benchmark users, 1.94s avg resp time, Cert#2007031, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10; Two-tier SAP ECC 6.0 Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY Model TX300 S3 (2 procs, 8 cores, 8 threads) 4x Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5355 2.66 GHz, 32GB mem, 1865 SD benchmark users, 1.99s avg resp time, Cert#2007025, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition; SAP, R/3, mySAP reg TM of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. More info www.sap.com/benchmark.

    I edited in:
    2 processors into Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5355 2.66 GHz

    ...and..

    32 threads to the Sun Fire T2000, 1 processor / 8 cores ...in order to make the comparisons more consistent.

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    Posted at 09:16AM Aug 09, 2007 in Benchmarks
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