A Look at Solaris 10 and Sun's Dual Core Fire V40z
by Kristopher Kubicki on June 29, 2005 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Rendering Benchmarks
We include Mental Ray and Shake as a point of reference, although both applications are strictly 32-bit at this time. Mental Ray is further hindered by the fact that the version we have is not SMP-aware.
Mental Ray 3.3.3
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. While Solaris allows us to run some Linux binaries with emulation, we could not get the license servers to install correctly, which made this a Linux-only portion of the test. We ran Mental Ray via Maya using the command below:
# maya_render_with_mr -file Benchmark_Mental.mb
Since Mental Ray cannot utilize all eight physical cores, this benchmark doesn't do the V40z a lot of justice. Nevertheless, you can see how a single core from an Opteron 875 stacks up against a single Opteron 250 from the previous two benchmarks.
Shake 3.5c
Apple develops a great digital effects package called Shake. We took the opportunity to run a 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
Even though Shake seems to support all the processor cores, there is a scaling issue. This is just one case in many where having lots of slower processors might not be as efficient as having fewer faster processors instead.
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Den - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Interesting article, I am confused why you are dissapointed in the GCC complile time though. The dual core machine took 369 seconds (with 9 jobs) and the single took 603.18 seconds (with 5 jobs). 603.18/369=1.635 or 63.5% faster which is well in the 50-80% range. Your article says 43% faster, so maybe the GCC compile conclusion is based on a typo?Kilim - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
I saw the title to the PS3/XBOX article. It was a different one than the original article from last week. I clicked on it to read it and nothing showed up. It was an article critical of the CPU's on the two systems I believe. Matbe Anand find some insider stuff that was only limited to a few people inside MS. If so, I think the potential rewards of protecting the source is much better long term than getting them in trouble and burning a bridge. Along with the long term effects of insiders trusting Anand.jwbaker - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
You can no longer get v20z via ebay. I managed to buy a half-dozen of them for $1200-$1500 each, although I admit I had to collude with another buyer to do so. Probably Sun has enough traction with the v\d+z series that they no longer need the eBay channel.The only beef I have with the v-series is Sun can ben recalcitrant about supplying the voltage regulator modules. In the v20z there are four removable VRMs and if you bought a single-CPU machine, you only get 2. Additional VRMs sell in pairs for $175 but the lead time is indeterminant and sometimes very long.
Houdani - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
32: The article was pulled in order to protect one of the anonymous sources (see comment #10).hondaman - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Actually, no its not. RHEL is by far and away more widely distributed, and more likely to show results to the people who can most relate to this review.finbarqs - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
i did read the comments, but i still don't know why it was taken down... it just said that it wasn't up to kris to take the article down.Houdani - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
30: What's with the hate?And it was quite obvious to me there were multiple sources.
Questar - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
So that article was based upon one source?!?!translation: It was crap, our source was an idiot.
yacoub - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Is there no performance increase seen with PC3200 RAM over PC2700?PrinceXizor - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
If whomever is really worried about protecting his "insider" source, you might want to contact Google to have them clear the article from their cache (I don't even know if that's possible).P-X