BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

bucket-o-records SPEC CPU2006 Sun Blade X8420

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

World Record SPEC OMP2001 Sun Blade X8420

Thursday Jan 11, 2007

The Sun Fire X8420 M2 topped the IBM System p5 550 (2.1 GHz, 4 CPU) result by 16%. The Sun Blade X8420 delivers the best performance on the SPEC OMPM2001 benchmark suite of all systems running 8-threads results using dual-core AMD Opteron 8220, produced best SPECompM2001 result of 23224.

The results show that the combination of Solaris 10 using Sun Studio 11 is unmatched by the competition for assisting users in writing parallel code.

More info on sun.com X8420 Benchmark Page.

SPECompM2001 (bigger is better, ordered by peak metric)

Result Cores Chips Thrds System
Peak Base
23224 22531 8 4 8 Sun Blade X8420 M2, Opteron 8220, 2.8GHz,64GB
21167 20409 8 4 8 Sun Fire X4600 M2, Opteron 8220SE, 2.8GHz,16GB
20319 19708 8 8 8 Sun Fire X4600, Opteron 856, 3.0GHz
19983 15355 4 2 8 IBM System p5 550 (2.1 GHz, 4 CPU)
19653 18949 8 4 8 Sun Blade X8400, Opteron 885, 2.6GHz
17948 16621 8 4 8 HP DL585, Opteron 880, 2.4GHz
16096 14335 8 4 8 IBM 570, POWER5, 1.9 GHz

Benchmark Description

The SPEC OMPM2001 Benchmark Suite was released in June 2001 and tests HPC performance using OpenMP for parallelism.

  • 11 programs (3 in C and 8 in Fortran) parallelized using OpenMP API
Goals of suite:
  • 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

Disclosure Statement:

    SPEC, SPEComp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.SPEC.org as of Jan 08, 2007, Sun result submitted to SPEC. Sun Blade X8420 (8 cores, 4 chips, 8 threads), 23,224 SPECompM2001. IBM System p5 550 (4 cores, 2 chips, 8 threads), 19,983 SPECompM2001. Sockets refers to chips.

Results Summary

    Result
    X8420 8-threads: 23224 SPECompM2001
    Reference Date: Jan 09, 2007
    System: Sun Blade X8420
    Total Memory : 64 GB DDR667 (16x4GB DIMMs)
    Processors/GHz: Four Opteron 8220, 2.8 GHz
    Operating System: Solaris 10
    Compiler: Sun Studio 11

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