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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kbsartain - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
The Database benchmarks are likely bottlenecked on storage. Attach a high-speed array with multiple disks, and the scaling would be much more linear vs. 2-way.ceefka - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
It would be nice if other Opteron-builders would add to the test so we can get an idea of how well the Opteron is implemented.I'd say webspace is best served with dualcore Opterons. 90% gain! Holy moly!
#23 I have worked as a temporary at Sun in The Netherlands in 1987 when they were about to release their 4/ series. Their 3/ machines were already considered top notch then. They offered workstations with an optical mouse that moved over a special gridpad and full color screens. That was really something special then. No AMD CPUs at that time.
To be perfectly honest as well, I also didn't know them before I worked there ;-)
sprockkets - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
SuSE Linux Enterprise not enterprise enough for u?KristopherKubicki - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
hondaman: This is why we used SLES this time around instead of RH9. Unfortunately the previous single-core V40z tests were all done a few months ago when we had that machine.Kristopher
Xenoterranos - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Wow, I wish my company had a use for a system like that. I'd take a paycut just to be able to play with it for a while... damned fine enginering on both Sun and AMD's part. And to be prefectly honest, I never really payed Sun that much attention until they started using AMD procs. Everyone else needs to get with the program and give AMD the market share they deserve...oh wait...I'll stop there.slashbinslashbash - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
#21: Read the comments and you'll find your answer.Kristopher: Page 7, "Apache Benchmarks" text:
"It's also interesting to note the difference between Solaris 10 and SLES 9 here. As the threads increased, there was a wider gap between performance of the Solaris configuration and the SLES configuration in favor of Solaris."
The graph on that page shows the opposite, with SLES outperforming Solaris.
finbarqs - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
wait why the xbox360/ps3 article taken down?hondaman - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
can you swap suse with a real enterprise os like rhel?themelon - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
I guess I should have kept reading.Sorry.
I have one of the v40's in my lab with 4 of the 875's. Very nice machine.
Doormat - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Does anyone know if the v20zs were dual core-capable? I heard that if you negotiate with sun (go to sun's ebay sale for the v20z), you can get really good deals. I'd love to just get two 270s if/when the prices come down.