The SPARC64-VI CPUs are pretty damn quick based on the experience I
have had with them (not SunRay but other cpu intensive applications)
also the UltraSPARC IV+ are much higher performance than the UltraSPARC
IV due to higher clock speed and the larger L3 cache. Of course these
are the high end CPUs which come with the high end prices.
In terms of raw single thread performance you can't go past the
generously clocked x64 CPUs, of course then you hit the application
support issues.
Personally I'm very interested in how the recently announced UltraSPARC
T2 performs in this sort of environment, T1s haven't been too bad but
with the slightly higher clock speed, 2x Interger units, 8x FP units and
the faster FB-DIMM memory the T2 should produce some nice results. The
beauty of these CPUs is that when you get things like crazy flash
animations occurring then it just ties up the one thread so performance
becomes very consistent (which I personally think is more important than
raw speed in terms of user satisfaction).
Would love for Sun to push out some benchmark comparisons between
USIIIi, T1 & T2 for end user application performance.
Ken Mandelberg wrote:
We currently use a V440 as a Sunray server. There is a population of
maybe 50 potential users, but there is rarely more than a dozen logged
in and half that many active. The active ones are running thunderbird
and firefox, and occasionally Matlab and various development tools.
Firefox can easily soak a lot of cycles.
The system is perceived as slow for two reasons. First, there are
times that there are too many users. We can solve that by putting a
second V440 we have in a rotary.
Second, even if you are the only user on the system its simply not as
fast as a modern X86 workstation. As far as I know none of the Sparcs
are really that much faster than the V440 for single threads. Maybe
the Sparc servers with higher cpu counts and cores can handle more
users and give more throughput, but I'm skeptical that single desktop
app's seem much faster than on the V440.
So is there a Sunray server that would give faster desktop
performance? Would an AMD/Intel server give faster Sunray desktops?
Even if it did there are issues because of software support. The Linux
support is disappointing. No NSCMS and rather old enterprise editions
that are not desktop rich. Solaris X86 on the other hand doesn't have
vendor support for Matlab and similar packages.
So its not very clear to me what server hardware would be perceived as
a real upgrade.
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