Feature Story
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Throughput computing.How multithreaded UltraSPARC® processors will help reduce the cost and complexity of network computing. 11.Mar.03--You need help. You've got a mile-long charter for network service delivery but face limited resources and a shrinking budget. What if you could handle today's workloads using considerably less equipment? What if you could do more with less? Count on Sun to deliver. We're igniting a computing revolution with our throughput computing strategy. Sun is focusing on what's really important--not clock speeds or megahertz, but the amount of work a processor gets done. In a word: throughput. And that is going to help us cut the cost and complexity of network computing. Within two years, we intend to improve price/performance by delivering blade processors that will increase today's blade throughput by 15 times. Moving beyond 2005, we are scheduled to ship system processors that will increase throughput by a factor of 30. Imagine the impact to IT operations. A single blade shelf will be able to do the work of 32 four-processor servers. Think about it. Eight rack units instead of 160. Less than 3 kilowatts of power versus 38. One blade system to manage instead of 32 servers. Total cost of ownership could drop by an order of magnitude while your system reliability and availability increases. Best yet, instead of sinking your IT budget into maintaining operations, you can free up resources to deliver new network services. Sound like a pipedream? We warned you it was revolutionary.
Making More of Moore's LawFor years, processor speeds have been rising rapidly, but actual application performance gains have been much lower. According to a February 2002 PC Magazine article, a 2.2-GHz Pentium 4 processor offered an 83 percent increase in frequency over a 1.2-GHz Celeron processor but delivered only a 20 percent gain in actual system performance. Even worse, this increase came at a price spike of 446 percent and a power consumption hike of 84 percent! The problem? An ever-increasing gap in processor and memory speeds. Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 24 months, effectively doubling processor speeds about every two years. Meanwhile, memory speeds have only been doubling every six years. As a result, today's blazing processors are stalled as much as 75 percent of the time while they wait for memory to fetch required data--and this promises to only get worse. Leave it to Sun to innovate. Instead of wasting effort wringing every last hertz out of complicated microprocessor designs, Sun engineers are focusing on new designs that solve your real-world problems. We understand that network computing workloads are inherently multithreaded. Maximizing throughput--or the aggregate amount of work done in a given amount of time--is more important than the speed of a single transaction. Here, overall throughput reigns supreme. Which is why we're developing new UltraSPARC® processors built specifically to maximize throughput for network computing workloads. While we will continue to design processors optimized to run a single thread, our new chip multithreading (CMT) processors are designed to process tens of threads at a time, exponentially increasing the amount of data processed each second. Say goodbye to the bottleneck caused by the gap between processor and memory speeds. How can we do this? Just as we brought symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) to your systems, now we're delivering SMP on a chip. Today's typical processors can only process one thread at a time and spend a majority of time waiting for memory. In sharp contrast, our upcoming CMT processors are designed to have multiple cores placed on a single piece of silicon, with each core being able to process multiple threads simultaneously. When a thread must wait for memory, the affected core will simply start processing another thread. This radically improved chip utilization is designed to make application throughput skyrocket, replacing wasted wait cycles with useful work. "Today's processors can be idle up to 75 percent of the time, leaving considerable room for improvement in processor design," said Vernon Turner, group vice president of Global Enterprise Server Solutions at International Data Corporation (IDC). "By focusing on increased application workload throughput instead of clock frequency, Sun's CMT processors should deliver significant increases in application performance." Revolutionary Bottom-Line BenefitsBy significantly increasing application throughput, our CMT processors can help you do a lot more with less. You'll need fewer systems to handle the same workloads, driving down your costs through dramatically reduced space, power, and maintenance requirements. With fewer systems to manage, your system reliability and availability will also rise. At the same time, CMT processors will cause virtually no disruption to your existing software due to our ongoing commitment to backward compatibility. That's right. We're completely changing the rules of the game without impacting how you run your applications. "By turning processor design on its head, we will deliver revolutionary benefits to our customers instead of incremental increases in speed," notes David Yen, executive vice president of Sun's processor and network products. "In fact, we believe we're the only company capable of delivering such a quantum change in network computing." For the last decade, Sun has strategically been putting the pieces in place to change the economics of your data center:
Our throughput computing strategy also offers long-term strategic benefits. By lowering your total cost of ownership, our CMT processors will help you free up resources, helping you to maintain a competitive advantage through the strategic delivery of new network services. And isn't that where you would rather focus your IT budget anyway? | |||||||||||||
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