Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Tuesday May 13, 2008

Sun unleashes Quad-core Barcelona systems
And not a day too soon, either! To quote Sun's press (I dont think I'm capable of writing such long, flowery and yet wonderfully descriptive sentences! :-)
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the availability of its first Sun Fire and Sun Blade systems powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, bringing new capabilities, increased performance and expanded scalability to customers that purchase or upgrade to these quad-core systems. The Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240 and Sun Fire X4440 servers, the newest systems to join Sun's extensive x64 (x86, 64-bit) server line, give customers industry-leading energy efficiency, density and scalability powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and a choice of operating systems, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), OpenSolaris operating system, Linux, Windows and VMware.
And as a footnote, Sun Studio 12 (with patches) is fully optimized for it (use -xtarget=barcelona switch in addition to the usual switches, to get better instruction selection, esp. for FP-style code). So far, feedback on this mode of code generation has been very positive. I had described these changes in a much earlier blog (as blog timelines go!) here with over 30% improvement on SPECfp and smaller changes on SPECint programs. The volume deployment on systems using Barcelona has been ...er long awaited. Its great to see AMD back in the game; I'm sure this will begin to take the quad-core performance battle with Intel to the next level.
Posted by tatkar ( May 13 2008, 10:28:26 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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