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
Introduction
Several months ago, Sun gave us the opportunity to look at a quad Opteron, 3U rackmount server that had everyone reevaluating Intel's dominance in the server arena. Four months later, AMD finally has some significant market share for entry level servers. Our original quad Opteron 850 server was an impressive piece of machinery, but since AMD's launch of dual core processors, a whole new class of high performance entry servers has evolved.
Sun was extremely pleased to announce to us that their dual core V40z had set the 64-bit SPEC JBB2000 World Record. We couldn't have been more excited to get a similar configuration for our testing to do some real world benchmarks for ourselves! Today we will look at one of these high performance Sun Fire V40z machines and see how they compare against the previous generation of V40z.
Since we are looking at an 8-core Opteron server today, a huge portion of our time will be dedicated to investigating scalability. While it is relatively hard to take an operating system or application and design it to run on two processors instead of one, it is also equally hard to take a system designed for two processes and scale it to eight. The cost prohibitive nature of 8-way systems traditionally make scaling defects difficult to really ascertain, and likewise its not too often that we even pay attention to them. With processors heading toward dual and eventually quad core, scalability of the OS and hardware begin to carry more and more weight.
For anyone in the computer business, there really isn't a better feeling than seeing 8 Opterons POST.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
KristopherKubicki - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Ecmaster76: It wasn't my decision to remove the article, and I agree with your thoughts as well.Kristopher
mastashake57 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
Let me tell you, we have the first generation v40z, and it's a total crusher in comparison to our Dell PowerEdge 6650s. Way to go SUN!Intel XEONs can't hold a candle to it...
Ecmaster76 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
that should read:But if there are liability and/or other issues that might come from leaving it up, than I will just have to wait.
Ecmaster76 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
KristopherKubickiI think everyone has read the PS3/360 article but me, its been linked on Ars and it was out long enough that someone at MS could have downloaded the whole thing.
But if there a re liability and/or other issues that might come from leaving it up, than I will just have to wait.
Ahkorishaan - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
#11 Solaris 10 is on the graphs, he jsut forgot to add it to the chart.Hey guys in Anandtech, think we could grab a review of the new Sun Ultra 20 workstation? It looks pretty sweet.
prd00 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
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.HEhuehueh... that's the reason why Sun server is still the best AMD server out there. HP and IBM should learn from them on how to build a good Opteron server.Anyway, Cray implementation of Opteron is still unmatched.
themelon - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
One question, why the lack of apples to apples os comparison between the two systems? You talk about S10 for two pages yet you dont list it as being tested on the Dual Core machine. That and you do not use the same linux versions on the two machines.To me that makes this comparison a whole lot less usefull. Granted, the perf should not vary to much between SuSE 9 and 9.1 but to not include S10 in the Dual Core comparo seems kinda silly.
KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
Ecmaster76: Eh, something was messed up with the content management system. PS3 article is pulled for now because Anand is worried about MS tracing his anonymous insider.Kristopher
Ecmaster76 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
Ah, rendering problems. Thats why this article isn't on the main page (2461, the console article is a dead link, and it occured to me that number was about three articles to high, easy guess).Shame on you for pulling stuff when you could just leave a little 'were working on it'.
:p
Beenthere - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
FWIW,AMD doesn't have "problems with it's customers" at all. AMD has problems with Intel's illegal Biz practices which have prevented many AMD customers from selling AMD products. With any luck HP, Sony and a Helleva lot of other PC companies will finally put Intel execs in prison where they belong. And you can bet all the companies that have been blackmailed by Intel will be a LOT more interested in selling AMD products now that the shit has hit the fan and they can come out of hiding.