Server platforms Toolkit

Sun prepares Niagara fanfare

Tags:
Sparc,
UltraSparc,
Niagara

Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 06 Dec 2005 09:45 GMT

...compared with the x86 standard," Yen said.

Each UltraSparc T1 has eight cores, and can run 32 simultaneous threads. The entire chip consumes a maximum of 72W, considerably less than rivals such as Intel's Xeon, which consumes 110W to 165W.

A complete Niagara system — including memory, hard drives and other subsystems — consumes about 180W for the T1000 and 325W for the T2000, Yen said.

To tout the power features, Sun has added a new element to standard speed tests that divides the score by power consumption measured in watts and server space measured in rack units. The test — called SWaP, short for space, wattage and performance — divides a performance score by a server's space and power consumption, which means the relative scores go up for small, energy-efficient machines.

Both systems require Sun's newest operating system, Solaris 10. Among about 100 customers so far are eBay and Air France, Sun said.

To salvage imperfect UltraSparc T1 chips, Sun will sell models with four and six cores as well. And in the first quarter of 2006, it will releases the cheapest models that use chips running at 1GHz.

With Niagara, a given thread won't be executed as fast as with conventional processors. But with 32 threads in process at the same time, the T1000 and T2000 systems are designed to run lots of tasks at the same time.

"Aggregate performance is what really counts," said Microprocessor Report Editor-in-Chief Kevin Krewell.

Speed test scores
Sun broke its silence on Niagara performance, publishing several speed tests to tout Niagara's performance. Among them:

On the SPECjbb2005 test of Java server software, the T2000 scored 53,378 business operations per second compared with 61,789 for an IBM p5-550 with two dual-core Power5 chips and 24,208 for a Dell PowerEdge SC1425 with dual single-core Xeon processors.
On the SPECweb2005 test of Web server performance, the T2000 socred 14,001, compared with 7,881 for an IBM p5-550 with two dual-core Power5 processors, 4,850 for a Dell PowerEdge 2850 with two dual-core Xeon processors, and 4,348 for an IBM x345 with dual single-core Xeon processors.
On the NotesBench test of Lotus Notes performance, a T2000 accommodated 19,000 users at $4.35 per user and got a NotesMark score of 16,061. In comparison, an eight-processor IBM p5-570 had 17,400 users, a cost of $10.19 per user, and a NotesMark score of 14,740. But the average response time of the IBM system was 270ms compared with 400ms for the T2000, demonstrating the relatively slow single-thread performance of the Sun system.

Despite the good scores, it's not clear whether Niagara is a "home run," Olds said.

"Right now, it's kind of a niche product — it's a big damn niche to be sure, but still a niche. I think Sun needs a compelling story for general-purpose computing in order to return to health, and I just don't see that right now."

IBM, unsurprisingly, remains unconvinced the UltraSparc T1 will escape a small low-end market segment.

"With Niagara, you're talking about a very niche architecture that is going to confuse the market with yet another alternative from Sun when going after Dell's customers for small workloads," Freund said. "It has no place as a general-purpose computer running databases."

And Sun has been damaged by its past processor performance. "This roadmap they've been touting now for quite a while has very little credibility and is not strong," Freund said.

And HP set up a Niagara-bashing Web site, casting aspersions on its single-thread performance and raising questions about whether software will have to be optimized for the new chip. (Sun argues that current software will run just fine on Niagara.)

Sun remains bullish that Niagara will help the company compete against rivals x86 and Unix systems. "It is a crossover product," Yen said. "The timing is right as the Internet build-out continues. We expect a significant wide adoption."