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
Final Thoughts
Looking back at our V40z, we have to applaud Sun for another design win. We didn't achieve the theoretical 80% increase in our test benchmarks, but we did achieve significant performance increases that would be unobtainable without a second core. Benchmarks that were not very CPU intensive but where very thread-sensitive - like ApacheBench - fared the best. Whether or not the extreme cost of such a system is easily justifiable is a matter of debate on more factors. For instance, where density becomes an issue, buying dual core processors are really the only way to obtain faster speeds, even if it is only 50% faster than the current generation. Furthermore, buying a dual core V40z might not be faster than buying two single core V40z servers for the same price, but the long term costs of administration and power consumption put the dual core machine in a more favorable position.
Sun has done a great job capitalizing on the performance of Opteron, but they aren't the only ones selling dual core high-density servers either. PogoLinux recently started selling their 8-way dual core Opteron 875 servers (16 physical cores!) for a price that isn't too distant from Sun's quad Opteron V40z. However when compared to the Tier 1 clan (HP, IBM and Dell), Sun has an extremely competitive pricing structure. HP and IBM have been late to phase in dual core servers, and Dell... Dell has just missed the boat altogether for now.
Solaris 10 proved a fascinating endeavor for us as well. Our experience with the operating system as a whole were mixed, generally due to the amount of sharp edges around such a new OS. On the other hand, tools like DTrace proved invaluable to us and Sun really has a great tool on their hands for developers and administrators alike. Also note that Solaris didn't have a problem keeping up with SLES 9 in most of our benchmarks. SLES 9 is a tad slower than some of the slicker installs out there, but it wouldn't be very insightful to put Gentoo on a $39,000 system either. We were very impressed by the fact that Solaris managed to stay a little bit ahead of SLES during benchmarks with heavy scheduling. We really didn't expect this, so perhaps all the efforts of Sun to incorporate better code into the x86 portion of Solaris 10 really paid off. Coupled with the extensive support community and projects like OpenSolaris, Solaris 10 is a winner.
Without much pressure from Intel, Sun has been pretty free to do what they want with AMD's processors. Sun is even going a bit on the offensive with Intel trade-in programs. Even though both AMD and Sun have been through some hard times recently, Sun is a great ally for AMD for two reasons; first, Sun knows servers - this is a critical market for AMD. Second, Sun isn't afraid of Intel and doesn't have nearly the problems AMD does with their customers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
nottlv - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link
#46; the 8 way record claim was for a 64-bit JVM. The PowerPC result you reference was for a 32-bit JVM. specjbb stresses the memory architecture heavily (there's no I/O); the submitted result from IBM include a machine with 64GB of RAM, while the Sun Opteron box had 16GB, and they are running different JVM versions. If you look at the lower numbered runs you'll notice they're pretty close (the Opteron being slightly ahead), but that it hits it's wall much earlier due to significantly less RAM.jjames5 - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link
8 way jbb2000 world record - right!This result is a year old and still bests the sun with over 50%:
http://www.spec.org/jbb2000/results/res2004q3/jbb2...
nserra - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
#34 That is plain stupid, it isnt from been taken out that it will protect him (if thats the true), or the microsoft guys cant read forums where the article have been already posted.Microsoft only have to look for who usually talk with anand.
Opteron - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Forget my last comment...ps. i missed 4 way Xeon and Itanium systems :D
Opteron - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
There is miscalculations about percentages, those are calculated wrong.In http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/sun%20fire%20v4...
comment is:
" We see a 43% performance increase over the quad Opteron 250 V40z; certainly impressive but we would like to see more."
But actually it's almost 64% since there is no point in comparing 5 threads vs 5 in a 8core system..
Googer - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Where did the article go?KristopherKubicki - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Den: Very true but recall that our previous test was done on Opteron 850s instead of Opteron 852s. The 852 performs a bit better than th 850.opus13i: We have been stuckin MI redtape land for some time. It wouldn't make sense to change the benchmark at this point either because our previous tests used the 32-bit single core solution. Since they don't seem to have much desire to provide us with the correct license we will probably drop that benchmark in favor of something a little more versatile.
Kristopher
Kristopher
jkostans - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
I dont care who made the hardware, its a hell of a machine. I wish Intel had to rely on inovation and good products to survive like AMD does. Intel really doesn't have many products capable of out performing AMDs equivalent anymore.opus13i - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
ugh.Did you even bother to check with mental images? With a simple phone call you could have had the proper licensing in place for 8 cores, as well as every possible variation of 64bit possible.
"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."
way to go detective, i dont suppose you actually looked at teh specifications did you?
http://www.mentalimages.com/2_1_2_configurations/i...
no 64 bit indeed.
Xunilla - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
You folks are giving Sun a bit too much credit on the hardware portion of this review. In reality, the system OEM is a company called Newisys, a subsidiary of Sanmina-SCI.