I too have seen several people disappointed with T2000 performance, at least initially.

Most of the time there is no need to change their coding practices though… it is usually a matter of changing their testing methodology.

The T2000s CPU was created because most real world loads have high clock rate (Intel, AMD, Power, SPARC) CPUs spending only 20% of their time running full speed and 80% of their time waiting for memory.

Many people benchmark machines with small data sets that tend to be representative of real world loads only when comparing traditional architecture (high clock rate) chips. If your benchmark, even heavily multithreaded, has the CPUs operating largely from within cache, traditional architecture CPUs are going to outperform the T2000 by potentially large margins due to higher clockrates and deeper pipelines. With no cache misses, the T2000 operates like 8 slow traditional architecture cores, but with a high cache miss rate, it operates as well or sometimes better than 32 fast traditional architecture cores.

I’ve seen the likes of a Java benchmark that showed 8 Opteron cores outperform an 8 core (32 thread) T2000 by 25% when using their benchmark data set of 500MB; when told their real world data size was 20GB, we asked them to try that. They ended up trying a 2GB data size as a compromize and now the T2000 was *outperforming* those same 8 Opteron cores by 30%. I’ve seen JBOSS app server benchmarks where a 200 user simulated load shows the T2000 to be 10% slower than an 8×1.8Ghz UltraSPARC IV+ (V490) machine…but the same benchmark with 400 simulated users shows the T2000 to be 25% faster.

You do have to load the T2000 up to see it shine. The good news is most multithreaded server applications these days are perfectly capable of taking advantage of the architecture with *no* coding changes. Just beware of artificially small data set benchmarks that do not properly reflect the capabilities of the T2000.

Though the T2000 starts out single-threaded, small data set loads far behind traditional architecture multiprocessor systems, as the concurrency and data sizes both increase (as is inevitable in most real world installations), the T2000 degrades an order of magnitude “more gracefully” than traditional CPU architectures.

Cheers,

Bruce

Yes, I agree, the T2000 is all about throughput. The whitepapers are very silent on the simple fact that although you can run 1000 things in parallel and get amazing throughput, sadly each request will take an appalingly long time to complete ;-).

I’ve come across the T2K at a couple of customer sites now, and in real world (vs: test lab or hypothetical) scenarios, the T2K’s appear to be struggling to meet the expectations of the business.
Whether customers have been led to expect V8xx performance for a V2xx price (which indeed appears to be the case) will doubtless come out in the fullness of time.

My personal belief is that vendors and developers would have to be convinced there was a ground swell of movement in this direction and fundamentally change their coding practices to suit for this kind of architecture to be of any use.

The reality appears to be that the ground swell is in the other direction towards cheaper and faster alternatives…

The T2000 is about throughput. After you get past the boot, how did it perform? How many threads? What was the TPS? I recently wrote an entry my blog regarding the throughput of the T2000.

http://blogs.sun.com/glennf/entry/getting_past_go_with_sparc

Hope this helps,
Glenn

Very interesting feedback. I don’t know enough about the J2EE layer to know how demanding it is on floating point, but that would serialize at least that layer of your stack…the Database really should not perform that poorly on T2000…maybe Glenn Fawcett will chime in…Glenn?

http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/tnb/applications_oracle.jsp
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/Solaris_Internals_and_Performance_FAQ

Finally, feel free to drop me a note “Glenn.Fawcett@Sun.com” or use the our T2000 experts alias “External_T2000_Experts@sun.com

take care,
Glenn

I have seen many of these take hold in large companies with large web presences.

Most customers that I run into running on the T2000 with Oracle absolutely love it. You get 8 cores and 32 treads with the throughput of a E10K in a pizza box… AND you only have to pay for 2 Oracle licenses…. No, I didn’t stutter. Massive throughput and only 2 Oracle licenses.

BCD… pretty much like all the other RDBMS engines …
http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/appdev.102/b14261/datatypes.htm

This will sound stupid.

If oracle does not do any floating point operations
then how doew oracle do operations on NUMBER(10,2) columns ?

thanks
amit