SparcServer 1000

From: Eric J. Korpela <korpela_at_ellie.ssl.berkeley.edu>
Date: Mon Apr 2 12:53:42 2001

> Being unfmamiliar with multiprocessor systems, I'm wondering how fast
> this will be in comparison to my 170MHz Ultra-1; slower for some
> things and faster for others, I guess, while consuming much more
> power---is this correct?

With 3 CPUs your 1000 will probably give you close to the floating point
performance of your Ultra 1 on a typical cruncing application
(13 MB/processor) well distributed among the CPUs (no memory contention).
I don't know about integer performance because I don't deal too much with it.

The I/O busses in your Ultra-1 are likely to be faster in Ultra-1 than in the
1000. Depending upon the number and vintage of the disk drives in each this
may or may not be a constraint.

The 4 processor 1000 I have access to here clocks in a 0.00053 second
Ahl's simple benchmark (4 process multiprocessing). The Ultra-10
(350MHz) on my desk does about 0.00078 seconds. Of course that's a 7k
executable, so it caches pretty well, but the 1000 beats the Ultra in
raw CPU. The 1000 has a non-Sun CPU upgrade, so its times should be better
than a stock 1000.

Of course the primary difference will be memory bandwidth. The Ultra-10
can move 123 MB/s (stream_d) while 1000 is lucky to get 32 MB/s.

Eric
Received on Mon Apr 02 2001 - 12:53:42 BST