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Is there any mathematical way of comparing a V210 with 2 X 1 GHz
Processors, 2GB RAM with a V890 with 4 X 1.35GHz Processors and 16 GB
RAM?


I need to compare a lot of things like this (V210, V240, V440, V480,
V890, V1280 etc and come up with a %age that one system is as compared
to the other.

I know that this gives me no idea about the application response as I
do not know how memory, disk or processor intensive the application
would be but still I need these figures.

Can anyone help or point me to some documentation that will help?

Thanks

SL

SL wrote on 2005-10-15 17:58:
> Is there any mathematical way of comparing a V210 with 2 X 1 GHz
> Processors, 2GB RAM with a V890 with 4 X 1.35GHz Processors and 16 GB
> RAM?

No, there is no such way. I take it you talk about performance and seek
statements such as "the V120 provides 59% of the performance of a V890".
You want to create one single number which contains the weighted
product of a lot of parameters (cpu arch, bus arch, os, patch level, i/o
subsystem, ram size, number of cpus, which applications to serve, how
many users to server etc etc etc...), this is not possible; and if you
tried, you would get into endless discussions on the weight to assign to
the different parameters.

In the Windows world there are a lot of benchmarks which are used to
compare different hardware configurations. Many of these tools provide a
single performance index as a result, which then can be used for
comparison between machines. However, you will see that there are a lot
of these benchmark tools and that a certain computer will score high on
some benchmark (which for example is io-heavy) and low on another (which
for example tests 3d performance). The point is that you need to have at
least some idea of what you want to use the server for (type of load,
number of users etc) before you try to figure out which server is the best.

--
- Erlend Leganger

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.

Thanks

SL

SL <shirish_lele@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thanks for your response. I had guessed that. Anyway, is there a one to
> one comparison I can do?

No

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