

Sun Leaks 6-core Intel Xeon, Nehalem Details - muriithi
http://www.dailytech.com/Sun%20Leaks%206core%20Intel%20Xeon%20Nehalem%20Details/article10834.htm

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xirium
This inadvertant leak could be in Sun's favour because they've already got
faster chips shipping.

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wmf
Sun is shipping faster chips than Nehalem?

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xirium
"At the time of its release in December of 2005, a single chip, eight core,
32-thread, 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 server performed similarly to a two-socket,
four-core, eight-thread, 1.9 GHz IBM POWER5 server, performed similarly to a
four socket, eight-core, sixteen-thread 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon "Paxville MP"
server, and exceeded the performance of a four socket, four-core, four-thead
1.6 GHz Intel Itanium server. Arguably, this made the UltraSPARC T1 the
world's most powerful general-purpose commercial server processors, when
considering multithreaded commercial workloads. ... One customer has published
results showing that a MySQL application running on an UltraSPARC T1 server
ran 13.5 times faster than on an AMD Opteron server." --
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1>

In October 2007, the T2 made significant improvements (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2> ) - most notably a 10-fold
improvement in floating-point throughput.

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peterlaurens
UltraSPARCs are rather specialised for general purpose processors - one could
make the arguments that GPUs, which massively outperform x86 CPUs several
times over in terms of FP performance, were faster even than SPARC, but it's
very much a different beast.

Also I haven't looked this up but isn't UltraSPARC much more costly?

Basically: Apples and Oranges etc.

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xirium
Given the rising cost of energy, companies include it in the cost of
ownership. So, if you had a server which was 13.5 times more powerful and
consumed the same energy then you'd definitely save money. Unfortunately,
SPARC would cost more up-front.

So, for a fast growing company, using x86 may reduce opportunity cost. For a
large, steady company, a rolling replacement programme of SPARC may be the
best option.

