[wellylug] Sun confirms plans to open source Solaris / hardware junkies!

[Wood Brent]

>Having said that, the 'traditional' 64 bit systems (or at least SPARC) 
>are about to have a major change to CMT design creating chips that have 
>massive parallel processing capability orders of magnitude more powerful 
>than current processor design. I can't tell you the numbers other than 
>to say 'WOW', SPARC definately has a big future in the data centre.

Potentially, yes. But how much like Intel's hyperthreading & other
optimisations which are in some contexts as much hype as they are genuine
performance boosts? 

Intel is planning multi-core cpu's RSN, which are in principle not too
dissimilar to those Sun is developing. So how much better will Sun's offering
perform compared to other multi-core cpus? If it is more a whole new
architecture, with better I/O, memory bandwidth, etc, it might have some value.
A faster cpu on it's lonesome is pretty crippled.

Looking at NIWA's (somewhat dated now) Cray T3E as an example, which offers
above average parallel processing ability :-), there are many analyses & models
which do not efficiently parallelise, so run like a (very old, slow) dog. Hence
the use of a grunty Sparc box as a numeric analysis server for some
applications. Which for some work is no faster than a good desktop PC.

Like most benchmarks on PC's these days show, the cpu is a very limited
component when overall system performance is examined. AMD pulled a coup with
the embedded memory controller in a 64 bit x86 cpu, to very effectively remove
one non-cpu bottleneck, but the fastest cpu/memory combinations around can't
process data faster than they can read data/write data. (Caching filesystems in
memory is a kludge- but a very fast & effective one).

Look at the I/O systems of summat like a 400cpu Cray to see how small a part of
the whole system cpu's are :-)

Brent