Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 22, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Rendering Benchmarks
Although one would probably not purchase a $20,000 server for the explicit task of rendering, we thought to include our standard Mental Ray and Shake benchmarks in this review to demonstrate the scalability of all four processors in the system. Similarly, we have looked at how these benchmarks perform on other systems in the past, so we can get a real clear view of the power of our V40z in relation to those systems.Mental Ray 3.3.3
Just to give a bit of PC trivia, MentalRay was actually first developed on Sun machines during its early stages, and it's interesting to see that we have come full circle to testing Mental Ray on an x86_64 machine designed by Sun. We are running the 32-bit binaries provided by Alias Wavefront. You may be interested to see how some single CPU setups perform on the same test render here. Once again, we are running the same Maya benchmark file found in our other reviews. We ran Mental Ray via Maya using the command below:# maya_render_with_mr -file Benchmark_Mental.mb
Shake 3.5c
Apple develops a great digital effects package called Shake. We took the opportunity to run a newer benchmark script by Lindsay Adams, which you can download here. The benchmark script renders 10 frames under various effects using one or multiple CPUs. We sum the render times and display them below. The times recorded are the averages of three runs.The command run for this benchmark is:
# shake -exec hardware_test_v01.shk -vv
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dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Typo page 1: "In January, Sun sent us a V40z demonstration unit that was complete with four Opteron 250s and 8GB of PC2700."It should be "four Opteron 850's"
Also, page 3: "The older 130nm "CG" stepping on Opteron 8xx only allows for PC2700 memory"
This is not true, generally. I don't know about the v40z, but CG Opterons can use PC3200 no problem.
See here, for example: http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2004q3/...
Ardan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I agree with #16. Fantastic work, Kristopher! I have a family member that works for a division of Lockheed-Martin and they are dealing with Sun more and more now and he enjoys your articles when I show them to him. He said a few weeks ago that he shows some of these articles to co-workers because of the thorough evaluations and it is helping them to decide whether or not to outfit their systems with Serial ATA drives (for Destroyers) and now with Opteron systems from Sun.Good work! ;)
tfranzese - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Excellent work Kris.KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Something is wrong with the DB graphs: i am fixing it now.Kristopher
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
http://www.newisys.com/products/4300.htmlGooger - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
This server is aperantly made by Nhttp://www.newisys.com/products/4300.htmlGooger - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
OOPS, this is suppost to go where the blank post is.To the author or whom it may concern: A bad link is located on page 3 and reads:
two Samsung 1GB PC2700 – link to Samsung.jpg>
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I want Game Benchmarks too! (just for fun though)nourdmrolNMT1 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
database benchmarks arent workin here either.MIKE