Sun has revealed two new Niagara servers: T5140 and T5240. Both of them have two UltraSparcT2+ processors which gives you 16 physical cores in a system with 128 threads in total. T5240, which is 2U version, also allows you to put up-to 16 SAS disks and up-to 128GB of memory - wow!
Prices - recently Sun re-priced old Niagara systems and now you can buy T5240 with 2x Niagara for the same price you could buy old 1x CPU Niagara system just a week ago - cool.
While T2+ has slighlty faster memory controllers but it has only two of them per CPU instead of four in T2... I wonder how it will impact performance.
Couple of technical blogs on new servers: 1 2 3 4
It has already been a problem to run a single T1/T2 to its full potential, let alone feeding two beasts of the kind. One has to carefully pick applications suitable for the architecture, with the majority simply running better on more common (Opterons, Xeons) hardware.
ReplyDeleteEven the performance results you link to show how important for the T2+ the threading is: the bops/JVM metrics are just plainly very low.
Going wide is a way to extract more performance, but a million of 68020 wouldn't be too useful, though...
One of the serious (and I mean serious) problems with this new kit is the attitude of certain proprietary software vendors. Of course, I mean Oracle, who treat a 1.4 GHz T1 as twice the processor value of a T1 1 GHz or 1.2 GHz. What's really bad is the announcement that a T2 core will count for 0.75 of a processor license. This really does make a T2 artificially weak when compared on price-performance metrics with AMD chips. Can you guys not have a word with Oracle on this?.....
ReplyDeleteI would love to see Oracle to change its factor to 0.5 or less.... but do not ask me, I do not work neither for Oracle or Sun.
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