(The following is a resubmission of a blog entry from February 10, 2006 with a few comments and edits. Changes are noted below.) Looks like our friends from BEA JRockit are at it again. Take a look at the following blog entry from BEA. http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/hstahl/archive/2006/01/new_specjbb2000_1.html First SPECjbb2000 is a 5 year old retired benchmark. Its time has past and SPECjbb2005 is its replacement. BEA loves to talk about SPECjbb2000, they obviously spent a lot of time optimizing for SPECjbb2000. The problem with JRockit is that they are optimized just for SPECjbb2000. If time was spent on optimizations for the real world they'd be able to maintain their competitive position with SPECjbb2005, right? The same applies for any other competitive benchmark (SPECjappserver2004, Scimark, and so on). The reality is much different, SPECjbb2000 is a special case for JRockit and performance gains there don't pan out in the real world. One more comment on SPECjbb2000. As I stated above the benchmark retired the beginning of January. Which JVM ended on top? Reading the BEA blog you'd assume it was BEA JRockit. Sun HotSpot J2SE 5.0_06 closed this benchmark as the final world record holder. Now lets move on, SPECjbb2000 is over. BEA JRockit tried to spin their current competitive situation in the best possible light, omitting many results that did not suit their smoke and mirrors argument. First, BEA positioned a fully configured 32-way, 32-core, 32-thread Itanium2 system against a partially configured 16-way, 32-core, 32-thread Sun Fire 6900 in an attempt to highlight JVM performance. These are completely different hardware platforms and any attempt to highlight JVM performance alone using these results is inaccurate. Comparing these results does give insight on throughput and scaling capacity but the comparison is at a system level and only demonstrates a JVMs capacity to fully utilize the underlying hardware platform. When comparing a fully configured mid-sized enterprise systems regardless of the platform, the Sun Fire 6900 (24-way, 48-core, 48-thread) beats the JRockit result hands down. 342,578 SPECjbb2005 bops, 28,548 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM (Sun Fire E6900 with Sun JVM) 322,719 SPECjbb2005 bops, 40,340 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM (Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 480 with JRockit) Also, please review the SPECjbb2005 results page. A quick scan will show that Sun HotSpot holds the record for single and multi-instance results, more than doubling BEA's single JVM result, and tripling BEA's multi-instance result. Funny how BEA forgot to mention these results. http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/results/jbb2005.htmlTWO(2) JVMs on a 4 core box. They even use 2 JVMs on a 2-core box. That's absolutely ridiculous. Why would anyone choose to do this? The only reason is they can't beat HotSpot running a single JVM and have difficultly scaling this benchmark on small 2 and 4 core systems. HotSpot could easily beat these multi-instance results, but chances are we won't submit multi-instance SPECjbb2005 on configurations that don't match customer deployments. (Author's note: Since hindsight is always 20/20, the following is more specific than the above paragraph) Now onto the AMD based SPECjbb2005 results referred to in the BEA blog. I'm embarrassed for BEA because they had to use these results to talk about performance. Their 2-way, 2-core result uses TWO(2) JVMs on a 4 core box. They even use 2 JVMs on a 2-core box. That's absolutely ridiculous. Why would anyone choose to do this? The only logical reason is they can't beat HotSpot running a single JVM and have difficultly scaling SPECjbb2005 on small 2 and 4 core systems. HotSpot could easily beat these multi-instance results, but chances are we won't submit multi-instance SPECjbb2005 on configurations that don't match customer deployments. Here are the latest 2 and 4 core single instance SPECjbb2005 submissions on a Sun Fire X4200 running Windows, Linux, and Solaris. 49,097 SPECjbb2005 bops, 49,097 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVMSun Fire X4200 running Solaris 10 x64 47,437 SPECjbb2005 bops, 47,437 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVMSun Fire X4200 running Windows 2003 Server 43,076 SPECjbb2005 bops, 43,076 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVMSun Fire X4200 running Red Hat EL 4 Fine print SPEC disclosure: SPECjbb2005 Sun Fire X4200 on Solaris 10 (2 chips, 4 cores, 4 threads) 49,097 bops, 49,097 bops/JVM,SPECjbb2005 Sun Fire X4200 on Windows 2003 Server (2 chips, 4 cores, 4 threads) 47,437 bops, 47,437 bops/JVM, SPECjbb2005 Sun Fire X4200 on Red Hat EL 4 (2 chips, 2 cores, 2 threads) 43,076 bops, 43,076 bops/JVM, Fujitsu Limited PrimeQuest 480 (32 chips, 32 cores, 32 threads) 322,719 bops, 40,340 bops/JVM. SPECjbb2005 Sun Fire E6900 on Solaris 10 (24 chips, 32 cores, 32 threads) 342,578 bops, 28,548 bops/JVM. SPEC™ and the benchmark name SPECjbb2005™ are trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of February 22, 2006. For the latest SPECjbb2005 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/osg/jbb2005.