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Fast Track to Solaris 10 Adoption: 64-bit PerformancePerformance IssuesPlease click on a question below or download a pdf version.
A: Some mechanism for patching kernel variables will always remain. However, we have purposely eliminated some of the more common reasons to mess with /etc/system, e.g., the shared memory and other IPC tuneables. These are now modeled as resource limits that can be tweaked on the fly (see rctladm(1M)), or even managed on the network via the project(4) database. A: You still won't be able to truss a process twice; however, the issue with Sun Cluster will be addressed when Sun Cluster migrates to become a service management framework (SMF) enabled service. A: "SunPro Business Unit," or, officially, "Sun Studio 10 Software," will be released concurrently with the Solaris 10 OS, at the end of January 2005. Sun Studio 10 Software will have considerably better FP performance than gcc/g77 (as has Studio 9; it will just continue to improve). We will also have features that gcc doesn't have: OpenMP2.0, automatic parallelization/vectorization, linker scoping, performance libraries (libm and libsunperf), much better debugging support, performance analyzer and a full-featured IDE, etc. Sun Studio 9 Software already improves over gcc for the 32-bit space; Studio 10 will go further and bring all that technology to 64 bits. A: There are many, many performance improvements in networking, virtual memory, system calls, and filesystems. Some of that work was enabled by applying DTrace to the OS itself. The fd hard limit is 65535 in the Solaris 10 OS. Other scalability improvements include further MPO optimizations (NUMA), more physical memory on both SPARC and x86 machines, large pages, and more address space for 32-bit apps on 64-bit x86 machines. A: We've already tested based on a), and have seen performance increase. For b) we predict improvement based on ABI and calling conventions. A: The short answer is, there is no "physically constrained" ceiling at 4GHz. The AMD Opteron processor is currently at 2.4GHz, with future products expected to ship into the 3.xGHz and perhaps 4.xGHz range. However, focusing solely on MHz is the wrong approach. There are many ways to improve performance. For example, micro-architectural enhancements to improve per-core performance; multi-core solutions to improve multi-threaded, multi-tasking, and more throughput oriented applications; system architecture improvements (like the current AMD Opteron processor's integrated memory controller and HyperTransport interconnect) to focus on system bottlenecks; power optimizations to improve cost and density. That all being said, of course, MHz cannot be ignored. A: Our ProEngineer results on the Solaris 10 OS/Opteron is more than 15 percent faster than on the Solaris 8 OS on 32-bit. Expect 64-bit to be faster than 32-bit. Comparison to Wintel is ongoing. A: Yes, but your mileage may vary. AMD has a fast memory subsystem and high clock rate. Depends on what the app is doing. Q: What types of applications (CAD, Imaging, etc.) take real advantage of 64 bits? A: Both memory-intensive apps (database), because of increased memory capacity, and computationally intensive ones (media, CAD, imaging, simulation), because of relaxed register pressure and improved large integer multiply performance. A: Performance depends a great deal on workload type. SPARC has many performance advantages in scalability and multithreaded workloads. The new multi-core SPARC processors will demonstrate order-of-magnitude performance gains. Q: Are there cases of a 32-bit app running slower on a 64-bit CPU? A: No, none that we have seen. Q: Are high-end servers coming with AMD64 and the Solaris 10 OS? A: The SPARC product line will continue to range from 2P entry servers to the high end 100+P servers. The AMD Opteron product line includes workstations and servers up to 4P today, with larger systems planned for the future. A: Our preliminary results show that AMD64 performance is 30-40 percent faster than 32-bit; our 32-bit Opteron processor is faster than SPARC. Q: Which has better performance in the Java environment, SPARC 64 bit or AMD64? A: We predict AMD64 will have better JVM performance. Q: Has any benchmarking been done for the Solaris 10 OS on AMD64 and Intel platforms? A: We have seen great performance on AMD Opteron processor-based systems with the Solaris 10 OS. 64-bit BLAST (bio-science benchmark) results:
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