Sun Cranks UltraSparc-IV+ Clocks, Tweaks Sun Fire Servers

Published: August 17, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Sun Microsystems has been making a lot of noise about its Opteron-based "Galaxy" servers in the past year, the Unix server supplier makes most of its money selling RISC/Unix boxes. And because of this, Sun is this week boosting the speed of its "Panther" UltraSparc-IV+ processors. The company is also making other changes to the Sparc-based Sun Fire server line that are aimed at boosting the performance and capacity of the servers.

The Panther chips were announced in September 2005, and they mark the first time in about five years that Sun was able to claim rough parity with IBM's Power line of RISC chips or Intel's RISC-like Itanium processors, which are championed by Hewlett-Packard. While Sun made the jump to dual-core Sparc chips with the "Jaguar" UltraSparc-IV chips in February 2004, Power and Itanium chips had far outstripped the performance of these chips by that time--even the single-core "Madison" Itanium chips could beat a dual-core Jaguar on many workloads. When Sun delivered the Panther chips last September, they had a much-improved design that included 2 MB of on-chip L2 cache--the first time Sun has added such cache directly on the processor. The Panther chips also included 32 MB of L3 cache off chip, the first time Sun has admitted that a cache hierarchy close to the chip--which IBM has done with Power and Intel has done with Itanium--is necessary to boost performance.

What the Panther chips did not have, however, was a relatively high clock speed. They were initially expected last summer at 1.6 GHz with a relatively quick ramp to 1.8 GHz, but the chips came out in September at only 1.5 GHz. But because even these slightly slower Panther chips offered twice the performance per socket as the Jaguar chips they replaced (and running at the same clock speed), both Sun and its customers were ecstatic. At the Panther launch last year, Sun said it would ramp up the clocks on the Panther chips to 1.8 GHz or so during the first half of 2006. But that did not happen. And some were expecting the chip during the July "Galaxy" server announcements. That didn't happen, either. However, these faster 1.8 GHz Panther chips are being announced this week, concurrent with another batch of Galaxy server announcements.

The new 1.8 GHz chips are available immediately in the Sun Fire midrange and high-end server line. That includes the V490 (with four processor sockets), the V890 (with eight sockets), and the E2900 (with 12 sockets). These machines represent the belly of Sun's Sparc/Solaris product line, but are the entry point into the UltraSparc-IV+ line. Sun's entry Sun Fire Sparc servers use the less-impressive UltraSparc-IIIi chip or the "Niagara" T1 chip, the latter which only comes in a single-socket box but does a lot of work for a single-socket server nonetheless. The faster Panther chips can also be used in the larger V4900 (with 12 sockets using four-socket boards), the V6900 (24 sockets), V20000 (36 sockets), and V25000 (72 sockets) machines.

According to Bob McGaughey, director of Enterprise Systems within Sun's Systems Group, customers who move to the 1.8 GHz chip from the prior 1.5 GHz chip should get a machine that can do about 20 percent more work on traditional online transaction processing and data warehousing workloads for which the Sparc servers are well known.

Other changes in the systems are aimed at balancing out the increased server performance. Sun is moving from 1 GB to 2 GB DDR1 DIMMs, which doubles the amount of memory that each server can have installed. The top-end Sun Fire 25000 can now have over 1.1 TB of main memory, which will boost performance significantly on some workloads. Sun has also introduced a new I/O subsystem for these Sun Fire machines, moving up from PCI to PCI-X slots and offering between 35 and 40 percent more I/O bandwidth. Sun is also adding 15K RPM Fibre Channel disks to the servers using the 1.8 GHz Panthers, as opposed to the 10K RPM Fibre Channel disks used in the machines with the 1.5 GHz chips.

With the original Panther announcements last September, Sun added new uniboards--Sun's term for a modular motherboard upgrade that is done by swapping a new board into a server chassis without making other system modifications--and charged the same price for the new Panther boards as it was charging for the older Jaguar boards. In the jump from the single-core "Cheetah" UltraSparc-III processors to the initial dual-core Jaguars, Sun charged a 15 to 30 percent premium for systems using the dual-core Sparc chips. And, this time around, Sun is going to charge a premium, too, for the extra performance that the dual-core 1.8 GHz chips provide.

How much of a premium depends on the model and configuration, of course. For a V490 server with four 1.5 GHz Panthers, 16 GB of memory, and two 10K RPM disks with 146 GB of disk capacity, Sun is charging $58,995. With the 1.8 GHz Panthers and using faster 15K drives, the same machine (with the same 16 GB of memory) costs $78,995. That's 34 percent price premium for a machine that does about 20 percent more work. On larger Sun Fire Sparc servers, Sun is employing the 1.5 GHz chips in entry configurations with relatively few processors and low amounts of memory, and then using the 1.8 GHz chips in beefier configurations, so it is hard to see what the premium is for the faster chips. On machines where you can compare, the price difference is between 27 and 34 percent.

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