On 9 Feb 2004, Chris Morgan wrote:

>
> Hi all,
>
> I did a trial build of a bunch of software I look after (mostly C++)
> on a new Sun Blade 2500 with two 1.28 GHz cpus, and for fun compared
> the elapsed time to an older Blade 1000 with dual 750MHz cpus.
>
> Here are the result :-
>
> SB2500 SB1000
>
> real 8m47.836s 15m22.264s
> user 16m15.640s 26m38.170s
> sys 0m55.280s 1m34.190s
>
>
> Yow! I like it.
>
> Both machines used Forte 6 update 2 and have 2 GB RAM. gmake was
> used to drive, with the -j3 flag to ensure the CPUs are kept busy at
> all times. These compiles are very cpu bound, I don't think much
> else really affects the readings more than a few % (linking is a few
> seconds for each of a handful of shared libs, which are all that
> gets built).
>
snip
>
> Even so, I think I can say the new machine is (by the standards of
> Sun SPARC Solaris machines that I am personally familiar with)
> "fast"

Nice... Thanks for posting the information.

Now for the fun part - Sun has announced the US-IV that "should" drop into
the SB2000 - the 1.2 GHz version of that part should substantially
outperform your 750 MHz SB1000 (and possibly breathe a bit of life into
the SB2000). If that wasn't enough, the US-IIIi+ (US-IIIi done on the 90
nm process) has 4 MB of on chip cache! This is supposed to have twice the
performance of the current US-IIIi.

I also have a question for you (asking for your best guess and not
anything that might be considered proprietary) - with Sun soon to support
the full AMD-64 ISA with Solaris (and presumably with Sun's C compiler) -
do you think that will have a positive impact on application avialability
for Solaris??

I'm guessing that porting Solaris to AMD-64 may end up helping Sparc sales
more than hurting - figuring that the more boxes sold that run some form
of 64 bit Solaris will encourage more people to write Solaris
applications.

Erik