Performance impact of the 7410 update

I'm a member of

Quicksearch

Codenews Search

Disclaimer

The individual owning this blog works at Sun Microsystems GmbH in Germany, a subsidiary of Oracle. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Navigation

< Ende des Wahnsinns in Sicht? | The interview with Larry at the Churchill Club >

Performance impact of the 7410 update

Wednesday, September 23. 2009

I mentioned the update of the 7410 hardware in a blog entry yesterday afternoon. Brendan wrote an interesting blog entry about the performance impact with "7410 hardware update, and analyzing the HyperTransport". For cached workloads (to get the disks out of the equation), the increase of performance is really impressive:

Workload	7410 (Barcelona)	7410 (Istanbul)	Improvement
NFSv3 streaming cached read	2.15 Gbytes/sec	2.68 Gbytes/sec	25%
NFSv3 8k read ops/sec	127,143	223,969	75%

What many people forget when talking about Istanbul, is the fact that it didn't get just two additional cores. You get HT3 and HT Assist (a snoop filter to reduce bus contention by processors searching their data in other processors caches) with it. Brendan summarized his findings with:

For this 7410 upgrade, the extra CPU cores help - but it's more about the upgrade to the HyperTransport. HT3 provides 3x the CPU interconnect bandwidth, and dramatically improves the delivered performance of the 7410: from 25% to 75%.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Solaris, Sun/Oracle at 12:20 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: english

, fishworks

, s7000

, solaris

, storage

, sun

Related entries by tags:

View as PDF: This entry | This month | Full blog

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

the new machine has more cores and more clock (2.6GHz instead of 2.3)

#1 molli123 (Homepage) on 2009-09-23 14:00 (Reply)

But i don't think this explains the increase of both values alone. The article of Brendan explains why the upgrade to HT3 was important. But you are right ... the 300 MHz are nice ...

#1.1 Joerg M. (Homepage) on 2009-09-23 14:32 (Reply)

Great, I'll wait a bit before purchasing my SS 7310C.

In the latest Fishworks update there is a new device : otoro based on the big X4600 (8 CPUs, 512 GB RAM).

#2 Frédéric V on 2009-09-23 19:04 (Reply)

To get 512GB ram in the X4600M2 would require the use of 8GB DIMMs, which is priced at $500 a DIMM vs $80-100 per 4GB DIMMs.

I am actually eagerly waiting for the 8 Socket Nehalem-EX from Sun which gives you 128 DIMMs, so you can use 4GB DDR3 to get to 512GB, cutting memory cost by 75%-80%, plus you get roughly 3x the CPU performance too.

#2.1 TS on 2009-09-23 22:59 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_.
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry

View as PDF: This entry | This month | Full blog

Competition entry by David Cummins powered by Serendipity v1.0

Links in this article

"7410 hardware update, and
analyzing the HyperTransport"

The LKSF book

The book with the consolidated Less known Solaris Tutorials is available for download here

Twitterfeeds

twitter.com/c0t0d0s0
@mperedim no ... research for a new blog article ;)

twitter.com/codenews
6914386 X freeze (and reboot) a build 130 system http://bit.ly/abvIH5

twitter.com/SunPatches
Security patch: 113723-21 - SE3510 423A: StorEdge 3510 array controller firmware upgrade. Available since Feb/08/10. http://bit.ly/btnK9U

twitter.com/SolPatchesX86
109810-12 - SunOS 5.8_x86: timezone data patch. Available since Feb/08/10. http://bit.ly/bW5k68

twitter.com/SolPatchesSPARC
109809-12 - SunOS 5.8: timezone data patch. Available since Feb/08/10. http://bit.ly/cNUNg8