From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Feb 12 11:18:07 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id LAA20981 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 11:18:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from fusion.gage.com (brimstone.gage.com [205.217.2.10]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA20974 for ; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 11:18:03 -0800 (PST) Received: (from mail@localhost) by fusion.gage.com (8.8.3/8.8.4) id NAA08873; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 13:17:54 -0600 (CST) Received: from octopus.gage.com(158.60.57.50) by fusion.gage.com via smap (V2.0beta) id xma008869; Wed, 12 Feb 97 13:17:51 -0600 Received: from squid.gage.com (squid [158.60.57.101]) by octopus.gage.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA21969; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 13:17:51 -0600 (CST) Received: from schemer by squid.gage.com (NX5.67e/NX3.0S) id AA22714; Wed, 12 Feb 97 13:17:50 -0600 Message-Id: <9702121917.AA22714@squid.gage.com> Received: by schemer.gage.com (NX5.67g/NX3.0X) id AA01171; Wed, 12 Feb 97 13:17:49 -0600 Content-Type: text/plain Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 4.0 v146.2) In-Reply-To: <199702121833.KAA18506@freefall.freebsd.org> X-Nextstep-Mailer: Mail 3.3 (Enhance 1.3) Received: by NeXT.Mailer (1.146.2) From: Ben Black Date: Wed, 12 Feb 97 13:17:48 -0600 To: "Jonathan M. Bresler" Subject: Re: UltraSPARC and MicroSPARC vs Pentium Pro ? Cc: mcwong@hotmail.com (M.C Wong), questions@freebsd.org References: <199702121833.KAA18506@freefall.freebsd.org> Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >quick dirty answer: > Integer: the intel boxes kill the snot out of *all* suns > Float: the ultras outperform intel boxes. see numbers below which indicate that a P6-200 slightly outperforms a 200MHz UltraSPARC in integer, while the UltraSPARC actually does "kill the snot" out of the P6 in floating point. >long answer: > the sparc architecture is limited in its ability to perform > integer operations. my suspicion is that the memory bandwidth > is not up to the task. (surely, its not the cpu itself, but > rather feeding data and instructions to the cpu that is the > limiting factor.) thank you, mr. wizard. unfortunately, completely wrong. the UltraSPARC machines all use the UPA crossbar switch which gives a bandwidth of over 1GB/s. compare that to a typical PC bus which is usually around 400MB/s (and is not switched, as the UPA is). quite simply, current mass produced Intel boards just can't compete for I/O bandwidth. if memory bandwidth *were* the problem, you'd expect it to show up in the floating point benchmarks. as for "killing the snot out of Sun" in integer performance, the SPECint95 numbers just don't show it: SPECint95 SPECfp95 Intel Alder 200MHz P6 8.09 6.75 Sun Ultra 2 1200 200MHz 7.72 11.1 if i get a chance, i will run the HiNT benchmarks on an UltraSPARC and a P6 here. i doubt i will see any snot flying from the Sun. benchmarks, of course, can always say what you want them to. b3n