Vijay Tatkar's Blog

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Monday October 13, 2008

SunStudio World Records on new Sun T5440 Server
Sun today announced a new revision to the CMT (Chip MultiThreading) lineup: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers.
These provide an astonishing 256 threads in a 4U box. A short while back, 256 HW threads would have been a BIG datacenter machine; these are now in a rackable 7-inch (4 Rack Unit)container! In this world of increasing parallelism, this is Sun's next and to-date most impressive step. All the while, as I talk about how much attention we need to pay to parallelism as a way of getting applications to exploit the full capabilities of HW, the systems guy have been flooding the market with 4- or more cores per chip.

Eight new World Records were announced with these new servers. Of these three world records were with Sun Studio 12:

These configurations handily beat IBM Power6-based, Intel Itanium, Intel Xeon, and AMD Opteron based systems in the same category (4 CPUs or fewer).
From what I can tell these are excellent mid-range datacenter boxes, both in performance and power characteristics, as well as cost.

Required Disclosure:
SPEC, SPECint, SPCfp and SPEComp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 10/10/08. Sun results submitted to SPEC for review.
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 x UltraSPARC-T2+ chips, 32 cores, 256 threads) SPECint_rate2006 - 301, SPECfp_rate2006 - 230, SPECompL_base2001 - 208,492. IBM POWER6: IBM p 570 = 4 x Dual Core POWER6 processors @ 4.7GHz / 32BM L3 cache per processor, 32GB, AIX 5.3. SPECint_rate2006 - 243, SPECfp_rate2006 - 216. Intel Xeon: IBM System x3850 M2, 4x Xeon X7460, 24 core, 64 GB memory, SLES 10. SPECint_rate2006 - 294, SPECfp_rate2006 - 156. AMD Opteron: HP DL 585 G5, 4 x Opteron 8360SE, 16 cores, 64GB, SLES 10. SPECint_rate2006 - 199, SPECfp_rate2006 - 170. Intel Itanium: HP Integrity rx6600, 4x Itanium2 1.6GHz, 24 GB memory, HPUX11i. SPECint_rate2006 - 102, SPECfp_rate2006 - 90.8.
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 x UltraSPARC-T2+ chips, 32 cores, 256 threads) SPECompL_base2001 - 208,492. Supermicro X7QC3 (4 x Intel Xeon X7350, 16 cores, 16 threads): SPECompL_base2001 - 82,487. Tyan Thunder n425QE (S4985E) (4xQuad-Core AMD Opteron processor 8360 SE, 16 cores, 16 threads): SPECompL_base2001 - 146,796

Posted by tatkar ( Oct 13 2008, 03:03:44 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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