[rescue] Sun is purple - not blue....

[Jonathan J. M. Katz]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com>wrote:

> Jonathan J. M. Katz wrote:
>
>> Sun has its chip design side, and it seems to beat out IBM. Sure, we love
>> PowerPC, but I think specfp for specfp the Sun multi-core chips are a
>> generation or two better than the POWER4/POWER5, but I haven't looked at
>> benchmarks in such a long time I'm really taking a guess.
>>
>
> I was under the impression that Sun's chips were faster under integer
> workloads but not as fast under floating-point workloads.  If memory serves,
> the differences are rather striking.
>

I honestly don't know. I do know that the early Niagra chips had a shared fp
unit for the 4 theads per core. The new stuff has a unique fp unit for each
thread. fp-intensive apps were no friend to the T1k/T2ks. Part of why they
had a special daughterboard for SSL/encryption.

-Jon