A Look at Solaris 10 and Sun's Dual Core Fire V40z
by Kristopher Kubicki on June 29, 2005 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
New Changes to the V40z
The heart of the new V40z is, of course, the Opteron 875 processors. Since a single 2.6GHz Opteron draws the same power as a dual core 2.2GHz Opteron, the V40z doesn't seem to have too much difficulty with drop in compatibility. In theory at least, a dual core Opteron 875 should have the same power envelope as an Opteron 252 but provides an additional 50-80% performance boost. For more details on the Opteron 875, please check out our earlier article here. Although AMD has some background in 8-way server configurations, it is not nearly as extensive as that of Intel, Sun, IBM or HP. Putting eight cores in a 3U is a huge step forward for AMD (and Sun) and processor scaling is a colossal issue.
Additional cooling is not necessary for the dual core Opteron 875s because they have approximately the same TDP as Opteron 852s.
Our previous V40z (Quad Opteron 850) managed to draw 585 watts during peak operation - well within the capability of the redundant 760W power supplies. During peak operation the new V40z with quad Opteron 875s hit 615W during heavy load. This falls in line with AMD and Sun's claim concerning the power consumption.
Aside from the dual core processors, there have been some other changes to the V40z since our last analysis.
- The two Broadcom BCM5703 gigabit controllers in the previous V40z have been replaced with a single BCM5704.
- The 800MHz HyperTransport links have been upgraded to full 1GHz HyperTransport links.
- The Service Processor now supports IPMI 2.0.
- Support for 300GB hard drives has been added to the BIOS.
The new features of the V40z do come at a premium; the base quad dual core systems from Sun start around $38,995 direct from Sun. However, there are incentive programs (including a Xeon trade-in program) that can reduce this cost by up to 15% and other promos running on Sun's webpage. Third party retailers are also selling Sun system at lower prices, but unfortunately the third party retailers do not offer the same support packages.
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Den - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Interesting article, I am confused why you are dissapointed in the GCC complile time though. The dual core machine took 369 seconds (with 9 jobs) and the single took 603.18 seconds (with 5 jobs). 603.18/369=1.635 or 63.5% faster which is well in the 50-80% range. Your article says 43% faster, so maybe the GCC compile conclusion is based on a typo?Kilim - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
I saw the title to the PS3/XBOX article. It was a different one than the original article from last week. I clicked on it to read it and nothing showed up. It was an article critical of the CPU's on the two systems I believe. Matbe Anand find some insider stuff that was only limited to a few people inside MS. If so, I think the potential rewards of protecting the source is much better long term than getting them in trouble and burning a bridge. Along with the long term effects of insiders trusting Anand.jwbaker - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
You can no longer get v20z via ebay. I managed to buy a half-dozen of them for $1200-$1500 each, although I admit I had to collude with another buyer to do so. Probably Sun has enough traction with the v\d+z series that they no longer need the eBay channel.The only beef I have with the v-series is Sun can ben recalcitrant about supplying the voltage regulator modules. In the v20z there are four removable VRMs and if you bought a single-CPU machine, you only get 2. Additional VRMs sell in pairs for $175 but the lead time is indeterminant and sometimes very long.
Houdani - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
32: The article was pulled in order to protect one of the anonymous sources (see comment #10).hondaman - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Actually, no its not. RHEL is by far and away more widely distributed, and more likely to show results to the people who can most relate to this review.finbarqs - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
i did read the comments, but i still don't know why it was taken down... it just said that it wasn't up to kris to take the article down.Houdani - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
30: What's with the hate?And it was quite obvious to me there were multiple sources.
Questar - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
So that article was based upon one source?!?!translation: It was crap, our source was an idiot.
yacoub - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Is there no performance increase seen with PC3200 RAM over PC2700?PrinceXizor - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
If whomever is really worried about protecting his "insider" source, you might want to contact Google to have them clear the article from their cache (I don't even know if that's possible).P-X