Posts by Greg

Exploding core counts: Heading for the buffers

What???

You need to do a little more reading Sun fanboy.

Who said anything about being stuck in a PC world? I'm stuck in many worlds, Windows is certainly one of them, but I'm fond of POWER, stuck with x86 but at least warming up to Nahelem (no more FSB) and stuck with the mainframe, but happy to be in most cases.

Just because Solaris has run on 64-way boxes, now 256-core boxes (M9000) doesn't mean it's scalable. Doesn't mean any given application I depend on is scalable just because it can run on Solaris on as big a box as a 256-core M9000.

Your "can't be done by any other vendor" statement is a wild assumption (or wish). BTW - do some reading - 250W is the processor power rating being talked about here and there, but last time I checked I had to put some memory and ethernet cards and often a few FC cards and some power supplies with those processors because apparently unlike you, I run my applications on servers, not just a processor. While I'm interested in work done per watt, I care about how much power a server consumes, not just its processor!

Let's have a look at the ROCK boxes when they become available and see if any of them can do the amount of work done by a 32-core Regatta with one hot little 250W burner on board. (Last time I looked, 250W for a processor is going to be rather hot.) If this happens, I will be both shocked and impressed.

That's not what I meant...

I think you missed my sarcasm. If ROCK actually stood for Regatta on a Chip Killer is was designed to take on 2001 technology. That makes it rather outdated and rather late.

At the end of the day, my position is multicore multhithreaded hardware is much easier for the hardware vendors to produce than it is for software folks (outside of Top 500 users) to exploit. Somehow those cores have to be fed data and instructions too...Sun's core count seems to be way beyond its ability to feed the cores with data (memory bandwidth per core).

Spare us the sales BS!

Yeah - Niagara is a wonder - lots of cores, no memory bandwidth. Look at any benchmark Sun has dared publish results for using Niagara boxes. They are no where near leadership in performance per core or even performance per watt against. I read somewhere on El Reg one time that ROCK stood for Regatta On a Chip Killer. Regatta - isn't hat IBM POWER4 technology that came out in 2001. ROCK's own initials imply it was meant to combat POWER4...hmm...IBM is on POWER6 now. ROCK should be a real barn burner! :-)

Single threaded performance is still important. Multithreading isn't that easy, hence the efforts in our higher learning institutes to promote more R&D in writing software for these wonderful new technologies. Multicore is only easy for the hardware guys!

POWER6 doesn't look too shaby - great single theaded performance at 5GHz with a system interconnect running as high as 2.5GHz providing lots of memory bandwidth per core. And Intel finally getting rid of the the front side bus bottleneck...

I personally like POWER6 and Nahelem and won't be getting of the mainframe anytime soon. Those are three pretty solid platforms I think.