Sun Servers with CoolThreads Technology

In the past, servers were evaluated on a single dimension: performance, but users of rack-optimized servers deployed into today's data centers need to be concerned about more than just performance. They have to assess performance while taking into account how much space the systems will occupy, and how much power they'll consume, especially today given increasing energy costs. SWaP is an objective, three-dimensional metric that provides a more comprehensive and realistic way to assess today's servers, because it evaluates performance within the real constraints of space and power consumption. SwaP=(performance)/(space*wattage).

Because their own customers will demand it, and if they don't publish their SWaP numbers voluntarily, SWaP is easy and transparent enough for customers to calculate on their own. Today's data centers are constrained in terms of space and power, and customers need a way to get an objective assessment of performance within a given power envelope. In the end, the market will decide what's most meaningful.

SWaP was designed primarily for the assessment of rack-based, or horizontally scalable, servers, where compute density within a fixed power envelope is critical. While SWaP can be used with any server, it's most revealing when evaluating rack-based servers that face hard, real-world constraints in terms of space and power. Many workloads being deployed onto high end servers have specific requirements for vertical scalability or the highest levels of single system RAS. SWaP doesn't consider these factors.

No other vendor has delivered a 32-thread, 8-core processor designed from the ground up for multithreading. Every other vendor has attempted to cobble together existing in-house technologies to catch up with Sun. Plus, no other vendor has a highly multithreaded operating system that can take advantage of the processor design. With our continuing development of the UltraSPARC T1 line of processors, and Solaris 10, we believe we have at least a five year lead on the rest of the industry, and that everyone else is going to be playing catch-up for some time.

Two reasons: We made the commitment to get started three years ago, and we started with a much simpler architecture. We made the decision to pursue multithreaded design three years ago, in 2002. Our competition is only coming to this conclusion, now, so even if they were to get started today, they would be at least two to three years away from delivering a comparable product. We've delivered eight cores and 32 threads, today. Second, because we started from a simple, RISC architecture, making small cores was relatively easy for us – especially as compared to companies like Intel, which have large, complex core designs that are very hard to shrink.

Obviously that's hard to estimate, but we think five years isn't unrealistic. Consider our competition: Intel and IBM. Intel has made a decision in favor of going multi-core, but they're sticking with the same pipeline for another two years. At that point, 2007, they'll move to a new pipeline that will let them get to 32 threads by 2010, another three years down the line – that's five years from today. We've just delivered 32 threads. IBM is working from a RISC architecture, like us, but they're way behind: They're projecting to get to eight threads in 2006, and 32 threads in 2007. Again, we've already delivered 32 threads, and by 2007, we expect to be far beyond 32.

Extremely well. The Sun Fire CoolThreads servers deliver 5X the performance, but use 1/5 the power, and only a quarter the space of competing systems. Here are some specific examples:

• For example, 3x more performance at 30% lower energy use versus IBM x346.71% more throughput and 4x higher performance/watt than IBMp5 550 (Power 5+)60% more throughput at ¼ the size of IBM p520 2 way with POWER 5+ processor.
• Over 2x the performance with less than half the power and cooling cost versus Dell.
• Based on testing at early access customers, the UltraSPARC T1 based test system produced 6X the performance of the previous generation dual processor 3.06GHz Xeon systems at half the power.

The CoolThreads systems have already racked up seven, new world records, including Java, web tier, mail, and enterprise class application tier performance. We've published our industry standard benchmark results as part of this product launch. You can review them online at:
www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/overview/learnmore

All Solaris applications will run on the new CoolThreads servers without modification. No re-coding or recompiling needed. We even guarantee it, with the Solaris 10 Application Guarantee.

Web and app tier environments don't need any rewriting. They're already CMT-ready, because they're written to take advantage of multiple threads and processes. Many applications and services are written in Java, and Java is highly threaded. Likewise, Solaris applications don't need to be rewritten to take advantage of CMT, either.

The Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 and Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers ship with Solaris 10 installed. We firmly believe that Solaris 10 is the best operating system available - bar none. That said, we certainly encourage the community to get other OSs running on the UltraSPARC T1 processor, and are pleased to have several distributions of Linux supported on Sun CoolThreads servers.