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
New Changes to the V40z
The heart of the new V40z is, of course, the Opteron 875 processors. Since a single 2.6GHz Opteron draws the same power as a dual core 2.2GHz Opteron, the V40z doesn't seem to have too much difficulty with drop in compatibility. In theory at least, a dual core Opteron 875 should have the same power envelope as an Opteron 252 but provides an additional 50-80% performance boost. For more details on the Opteron 875, please check out our earlier article here. Although AMD has some background in 8-way server configurations, it is not nearly as extensive as that of Intel, Sun, IBM or HP. Putting eight cores in a 3U is a huge step forward for AMD (and Sun) and processor scaling is a colossal issue.
Additional cooling is not necessary for the dual core Opteron 875s because they have approximately the same TDP as Opteron 852s.
Our previous V40z (Quad Opteron 850) managed to draw 585 watts during peak operation - well within the capability of the redundant 760W power supplies. During peak operation the new V40z with quad Opteron 875s hit 615W during heavy load. This falls in line with AMD and Sun's claim concerning the power consumption.
Aside from the dual core processors, there have been some other changes to the V40z since our last analysis.
- The two Broadcom BCM5703 gigabit controllers in the previous V40z have been replaced with a single BCM5704.
- The 800MHz HyperTransport links have been upgraded to full 1GHz HyperTransport links.
- The Service Processor now supports IPMI 2.0.
- Support for 300GB hard drives has been added to the BIOS.
The new features of the V40z do come at a premium; the base quad dual core systems from Sun start around $38,995 direct from Sun. However, there are incentive programs (including a Xeon trade-in program) that can reduce this cost by up to 15% and other promos running on Sun's webpage. Third party retailers are also selling Sun system at lower prices, but unfortunately the third party retailers do not offer the same support packages.
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nottlv - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link
#46; the 8 way record claim was for a 64-bit JVM. The PowerPC result you reference was for a 32-bit JVM. specjbb stresses the memory architecture heavily (there's no I/O); the submitted result from IBM include a machine with 64GB of RAM, while the Sun Opteron box had 16GB, and they are running different JVM versions. If you look at the lower numbered runs you'll notice they're pretty close (the Opteron being slightly ahead), but that it hits it's wall much earlier due to significantly less RAM.jjames5 - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link
8 way jbb2000 world record - right!This result is a year old and still bests the sun with over 50%:
http://www.spec.org/jbb2000/results/res2004q3/jbb2...
nserra - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
#34 That is plain stupid, it isnt from been taken out that it will protect him (if thats the true), or the microsoft guys cant read forums where the article have been already posted.Microsoft only have to look for who usually talk with anand.
Opteron - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Forget my last comment...ps. i missed 4 way Xeon and Itanium systems :D
Opteron - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
There is miscalculations about percentages, those are calculated wrong.In http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/sun%20fire%20v4...
comment is:
" We see a 43% performance increase over the quad Opteron 250 V40z; certainly impressive but we would like to see more."
But actually it's almost 64% since there is no point in comparing 5 threads vs 5 in a 8core system..
Googer - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Where did the article go?KristopherKubicki - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Den: Very true but recall that our previous test was done on Opteron 850s instead of Opteron 852s. The 852 performs a bit better than th 850.opus13i: We have been stuckin MI redtape land for some time. It wouldn't make sense to change the benchmark at this point either because our previous tests used the 32-bit single core solution. Since they don't seem to have much desire to provide us with the correct license we will probably drop that benchmark in favor of something a little more versatile.
Kristopher
Kristopher
jkostans - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
I dont care who made the hardware, its a hell of a machine. I wish Intel had to rely on inovation and good products to survive like AMD does. Intel really doesn't have many products capable of out performing AMDs equivalent anymore.opus13i - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
ugh.Did you even bother to check with mental images? With a simple phone call you could have had the proper licensing in place for 8 cores, as well as every possible variation of 64bit possible.
"We include Mental Ray and Shake as a point of reference, although both applications are strictly 32-bit at this time. Mental Ray is further hindered by the fact that the version we have is not SMP-aware."
way to go detective, i dont suppose you actually looked at teh specifications did you?
http://www.mentalimages.com/2_1_2_configurations/i...
no 64 bit indeed.
Xunilla - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
You folks are giving Sun a bit too much credit on the hardware portion of this review. In reality, the system OEM is a company called Newisys, a subsidiary of Sanmina-SCI.