[rescue] Follow up: Which Sun machine to keep?

[Gian-Paolo Musumeci]

On Dec 20, 2009, at 11:36 AM, Earl Baugh wrote:
>>> Second, the 440 vs 500 Mhz CPUS...  the Ultra 10 IIi 440Mhz has 2MB
>>> cache to the Blade IIe 500Mhz's 256K.   Which is going to give better
>>> perceived performance?  Does the 2MB more than make up for the 60Mhz
>>> difference?
>> More cache makes very large difference when comparing 1M versus 2M, so I
>> would imagine it is even larger here.  On my Suns where I might actually
>> compare 2M versus 256K, there were other differences, like one being IDE
>> while the other had a SCSI card, so they probably aren't fair to judge
>> on.
> Has anybody got any more personal experience to share here?  I've also seen
> better performance with the larger cache, but haven't been able to compare
> any two systems with CPU's on similar clock speeds like these boxes are.


One could consult the archived SPECint2000 benchmarks to get an idea of
relative performance, but as there are no published results for a 440 MHz
UltraSPARC-IIi, you'll have to extrapolate a little bit....

The short answer, though, is that the CPUs will likely perform very
similarly, so I'd choose based on other factors.  The larger L2 cache on
the UltraSPARC-IIi is largely mitigated by other factors (cache positioning
and memory bandwidth being the main contributors).

As you no doubt know, the Blade 100 is quite a bit more power efficient,
but loses out on expansion capabilities.  Hope this helps -- /gp