SL wrote:
> Thanks for your response. I had guessed that. Anyway, is there a one to
> one comparison I can do? Like
> A dual processor 890 Vs a single processor 210 with respect to just
> computing power?
> A system with 16 GB RAM (on 890) Vs a system with 2 GB RAM (on 210)
> etc?
>
> I am not really worried about application response times at this stage
> and was wondering if I can have a one to one map of memory, CPU etc
> instead of a single composite no.

You need to understand that the architectures of the V210 and the
V890 are very differernt.

The V210 has four DDR2 DIMMS stuck directly on each singlecore
CPU/MMU chip.
The memory bus is 128 bits. giving you maximum 8 GB ram
The V210 has Ultrasparc IIIi CPUS with integrated 1 MB Caches.

The V890 has 16 SDRAM DIMMS shared between 2 DualCore CPUS.
The memory bus is 512 bits
The Caches are external 8 MB caches unless you are talking about
the latest UltraSparc IV+ CPUS that have a combination of
an integrated L2 cache and an external L3 cache.
That is duplicated in 4 modules. Giving you maximum of
8 dualcore CPU's with 64 GB ram.
This four modules are interconnect with a 9.6 GigaByte/sec
system interconnect.

The processing characteristics that you get from these two
system are not related as PC-servers performance are.

The smallest 890 you can buy with a single module of
two DualCore 1.35 Ghz CPUS, ( i.e. 4 cores ) already has almost
three times the processing power of the V210, counting only Ghz.
OR if talking about the new 1.5 GHz Ultrasparc IV+ with its
improved CPU cores probably a throughput difference of more
than four times.
Then there is a Huge difference in the amount of Cache memory.
The smallest V890 can run 4 threads simultaneosly while the
V210 can run only 2.

The boxes are so different that you cant say that an app is
X times faster on the V890 than the V210
The charateristics of the execution environment change radically.

If Your application is multithreaded like a webserver or a database
It will run a lot faster on the V890 than the V210.

If your app is a singelthreaded simulation of some sort you will
instead need the CPU with the fastest clockrate, this is today
the SUN X4200 Galaxy server with 2.8 Ghz AMD64 Opteron 254 CPU's

//Lars