IBM touts Power Systems prowess on SAP tests

Sun have been at it too

Sun have been benchmarking too, boasting about how they beat IBM:-http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/sun_t5440_world_record_sap

Mind you the most interesting that about that is the HP DL585 that came

second. A £15k DL585 was only slightly behind an £85k T5440. No idea

how much power6 machines are. But why bother with RISC at all any more

at those price/performance ratios?

Compare Power550 against Sun T5440 Midrange Peer!

Timothy Prickett Morgan writes, "The full list of SAP SD benchmark tests can be found here, and for the sake of this discussion, I am just going to compare the Power 550 to its midrange peers."

I am surprised the Sun quad-socket T2 processor was not compared in the article!

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2009-07/sunflash.20090721.2.xml

"Running the SAP solution with Oracle Database, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server surpassed the competing IBM System 550 server with four POWER6 processors by 26 percent with 3,752 SAP SD Benchmark users(1). This result also highlights the optimal performance of SAP ERP on the Solaris OS and the seamless multilingual support available for SPARC Enterprise systems running SAP applications."

Taking a closer look at the benchmarks

http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd2tier.epx?num=100

IBM Quad Socket Power 6

6/16/2009 IBM 3752 0.97 1231000 20520 410330 AIX 6.1 DB2 9.5

SUN Quad Socket T2+

7/21/2009 Sun 4720 0.97 1550000 25830 516670 Solaris 10 Oracle 10g

Comparing Sun/Oracle SPARC/Solaris/Oracle10g against IBM Power/AIX/DB2, it seems like the OpenSPARC T2+ from Sun cleaned Power6's clock:

- OpenSPARC supported ~28% more users over Power6

- OpenSPARC supported ~26% more dialog boxes over Power6

- OpenSPARC supported ~26% higher SAP's over Power6

- OpenSPARC supported ~26% more line items processed per hour over Power6

Why was the quad socket OpenSPARC T2+ not considered a Power550 Midrange Peer, with the same number of sockets and higher performance on the same benchmark?

Anon: But why bother with RISC at all any more...?

Anonymous posts, "But why bother with RISC at all any more at those price/performance ratios?"

I think this is a very good question.

Usually, smaller chip vendors will do performance hopping, with the RISC vendors releasing a higher priced product with more dramatic performance increases than the more granular increases seen more often by the larger volume traditional vendors.

If vendors like IBM sees a good speed bump out of POWER7 released soon and SUN seesa good speed bump out of T3 released soon - your question will be answered with a completely different answer than what some people suggest today.

Let's see what the competing chip vendors offer in the next 1-2 quarters!

FYI ... Sun is history

Why would you even want to buy a T2 or anything on Sun? Oracle will either sale the hardware business (if any takers) or just keep it around to migrate others to x86 boxes.

The T2 is a nice low end RISC box, but as a SUN customer (well we were until this year) we our planning a migration for our Solaris boxes to either Linux or AIX. I myself prefer going with Linux but upper management likes the idea of having a big throat to joke so looks like we will be going with IBM AIX p595 boxes and LPAR the many medium size applications.

Hey, Kebabbert, we were a SUN shop

Kebabbert,

Ok, we are still a SUN shop since we have many SUN boxes (M5000's, T5520's, v440's, v210's, and 4800's) still in our data centers. But when an older SUN box needs to get replaced we can not purchase a new T2+ or any other SUN server even though it would be fine. The reason is that upper management told us that they will not sign for any new hardware from Sun. So the T2 and T2+ could be a good fit for our older SUN equipment that we need to get replaced, but we have to look somewhere else and I'm sure we are not the only company.

Companies like mine have some major concerns about SUN hardware and for you to dismiss them proves that your head is in the sand or have too much of a bias opinion towards SUN. My company and others have two choices, wait to see what happens to SUN's hardware or replace older SUN equipment with HP or IBM. My company went with the second option of just going with IBM AIX (have it already in our shop as well) as a replacement (again upper management decision) for Solaris. So at the very least you have to agree that companies need to make a contingency plan since know one knows the fate of the SPARC chip. Which you have to agree hurts SUN since many companies will look at other options.

I'm sure you will not like this, but here is a good podcast about the roadmap for Sun customers after the Oracle acquisition by the Burton Group:

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid80_gci1362140_mem

1,00.html?track=NL-832&ad=716328&asrc=EM_NLN_8764838

By the way, I posted anonymous NOT because I'm Matt Bryant (who just like you seems to have his own agenda) but because my fellow co-workers also read these articles.

RE Kebabbert

>Here we see some old benches where T2 outperformed Power6, on spec_int, ORACLE, SAP, Lotus Notes, etc.

>

>http://johnjmclaughlin.blogspot.com/2007/10/utrasparc-t2-server-benchmark-results.html

Are you serious ? These are BMSeer quotes, do you seen any other people participating here using links HP or IBM marketing fud ?

These are chip versus chip comparisons. Yes they are perhaps interessting to you. But if you are talking Licinsing, setting

up real world applications or even comparing servers versus servers they are utterly meaningless.

Have you ever tried to setup a 4 threaded system versus a 64 threaded system to do the same workload ? It's a completely different

ballgame.

You just put yourself in the same category of people that you are pointing fingers at by using SUN's own FUD central.

>SUN has publicly stated that TPC-C is meaningless. It is favours pathological servers that no one use in real life. A while ago, IBM held the record.

>The server used many many Intel CPUs (not Power cpus) and 2TB RAM! And it used many short stroked hard drives! Who uses short stroked hard drives?

>How much does 2TB RAM cost? This config is really silly. And this IBM machine costed like 120 million USD, built for one purpose: TPC-C but nothing else.

>People shun away from TPC-C, they say "if you are good at TPC-C, then it proves that you are good at TPC-C and nothing else.

>Literally nothing else, certainly not average DB usage".

Who cares what SUN says. TPM-C have done more for Database performance, cause the hardware vendors actually learn something from this benchmarks, that goes

into their products, than SUN has done since they choose to stop making those benchmarks.

> If you really think that a average DB admin has access to this machine, then you are wrong. TPC-C is really artificial.

Sure TPC-C is artificial, it's a benchmark. But jup I have access to several, You name it POWER5 p595's with 2TB of RAM, SUPERDOMEs with 64xPA8900

or 128 way x I2 Montecitos, power 570 with 16 4.7GHz cores. And yes they are getting used some with quite large partitions. 56+ cores.

> SUN could also build a server with many intel CPUs and compete in this artificial test, but why would they? It says nothing about real life applications.

So why don't they ?

> Your point does not prove that Power6 is better than Niagara, which is not.

> This reminds of Top500 supercomputers, which are basically a bunch of nodes in a large network.

>On rank nr 5 we find the IBM Blue Gene super computer. It has.... dual core 700MHz PowerPC CPUs! Does a high ranking at Top500 mean that

> IBM makes better CPUs than SUN? Not quite.

You don't really get it do you ? You hail systems with lots of slow cores and lots of threads and then you scoff at Blue Gene, which kind of like uses

the same principle. I mean... you make less and less sence.

>"Even Oracle confirms that, since the processor factor licensing table shows Niagara is the slowest, then comes Intel and IBM are the fastest."

> Come again? Do you mean that Niagara is slower than IBM?

Sure it is. Don't confuse speed with throughput. A niagara Chip will deliver more throughput than a POWER6 chip. But on a core to core basis there

really isn't a match. On a throughput basis it's different there the 8 core 64 threaded niagara chip will outperform a POWER6 chip, if...

1) Your workload can be threaded to enough threads to exploid the 64 threads of the niagara. Not much good if you only have 4 threads.

2) All your bloody threads doesn't block eachother.

3) Your job isn't depending on serialization like the job I'm doing tuning on at the moment. 10 min with 1 thread, then 20 min with Many threads,

then 10 min with one thread and result. The job is heavily CPU bound.

Now who would run this job fastest ? This currently runs on a 3 Core POWER6 4.7Ghz Virtual machine.

Now on a niagara I would most likely get 80 min with 1 thread 14 min with many threads 80 min with 1 thread, oh yes sure I could start up a whole

development project to paralize the code, and pay more for my Oracle License. Welcome to the REAL world.

>It depends on the work load. If I have to transport 1000 persons from one place to another, then what would YOU choose?

>Niagara is like a huge slow bus, whereas legacy constructed CPU as Intel/Power6 are like a porsche.

>Imagine you have to transport 1000 persons. Which would be first to finish? Niagara or Power6?

Wrong again, Niagara is the 64 small slow minibusses, where you need 64 drivers, power6 are 4 fast Large busses using only 4 drivers. So sure

>Niagara shines on multi threaded work under huge loads. It never chokes, which Power6 does.

What are you talking about ? Try slamming your 64 minibusses and 4 Large busses onto a public road, and see who messes up. The sheer

complexity of having 64 threads versus 4 is exactly why the niagara chokes.

>"IBM has 100% right to count cores instead of sockets"

>

>Yes of course. But if you talk about the highest performing CPU, the FASTEST CPU, the you should compare cpu vs cpu, not compare core vs core. Right?

You seem to forget that before Intel and SUN started calling multi core, chips for CPU's, a CPU was equal to what we today call a core for.. well 60 years

or so. And it worked it confused people like you. So why don't we start to call a pig for chicken. It will do wonders for the PIG meat sales.

> Maybe all SUN lovers should write that to? Post as "Anonymous Coward" and write "We love IBM and Power6, but when we tried the new Niagara it smoked!

>And it is one fifth of the price. So we are now swapping our Power6 to Niagara. Sadly.

>I really liked Power6, but clearly Niagara is better and way cheaper. We just can not afford 413.000USD P570 vs a 76.000USD Niagara.

>And the Niagara smokes P570 too".

Well I've seen people throw away their new Niagara boxes, and replace them with partitions on old POWER5 partitions on p595's. Why ? It made sence from

a licing perspective, and running RAC on the Niagara boxes performed so badly that they actually tried to move it to the older v880 test machines to get

some throughput.

And if people are stupid enough to only focus on the cost of the hw box, then let them I don't care. When they mess up their IT infrastructure, then come

to us and we'll throw the lot onto a large POWER server and we'll give you more performance, better uptime at a lower cost.

// Jesper

RE: Kebabbert & Novatose

Good to see the whole Sunset thing hasn't got old Novatose down, he's still furiously pluggin' away with his cherry-picked benchmarks. And now he has an ickle side-kick in wet-behind-the-ears Kebabbert, our junior league contender from some continental outback uni where they probably still wear lederhosen. Maybe the two should get together, they seem to have a lot in common, especially the ability to type with their heads firmly subterranean.

I especially enjoyed Kebabbert mentioning the other thread he has been amusing us all in, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/sun_sparc_t_crank/comments/, as that's also the thread where, after telling us all how good and smart he is, he has to admit he can't understand why his own bosses won't buy Sun! What he can't understand is that there is a lot that goes into the selection of a platform that gets to run an enterprise application, and "clever" CPU design is not very high on the agenda. Especially when that "clever" CPU design runs like a dog with the type of applications businesses actually want to use.

As for TPC-C, Sun were quite happy to brag about TPC benchmarks for years when they had a design that could compete, but as UltraSPARC got further and further behind Sun got quieter and quieter, and then they just switched to FUDing a benchmark they used to use as a sales tool. It is very true that TPC-C is no real guide as to how your application will run in your environment with your stack, but Sun were quite happy to sing its praises when they had a song to sing. But I think you'll find that I have repeatedly advised in my posts that you ignore any vendor bench as anything other than a rough guide and instead insist on having a shoot-out in your environment, with your data, your tools and your application stack, as it is the ONLY way to get a realistic view of how that platform will perform in real use. It's also a good way to screw a few more points off the price ;)

But I guess you'll just call that advice more "lying" - how funny! It shows a major lack of both maturity and just plain manners that you immediately accuse anyone that disagrees with you of being a "liar", I do suggest that you moderate your approach, especially as you may end up working with really stressed individuals like DBAs, and they may not take too kindly to your tone. Well, you may end up working with DBAs if you work with something other than Niagara!

And as for short-stroked disks, you'd be amazed at some of the tricks I've seen used to try and squeeze a few more transactions out of a system! I have seen an EMC disk array populated with the maximum number of disks and the maximum number of interface ports, all to try and get a 20GB database to run that little bit faster. I reckon they were using less than 2% of the available disk space, but because their business depended on making that database fly, they paid for the massively under-utilised storage, and over-spec'ed server cluster, and dedicated SAN and LAN links. Sometimes the business requirements really do mean you end up with what is technically a poorly-utilised design, but if it's what the business wants and will pay for then it will happen.

Anyway, isn't it about time we started referring to it as Oracle Niagara? Oh, hold on a sec - Larry still hasn't committed to actually making any more Niagara, so all the hot air about T3 is likely to remain just that, just as it did with Rock.

/SP&L <= Kebabbert may need one of the older Sunshiners to explain this for him.

RE:Compare Power550 against Sun T5440 #

Jesper Frimann Posted, "I mean you would need a 42 inch monitor and a real small font to just to be able to see all the threads in top SMP view, on the T5440. I mean 256 Threads versus 16 for the power 550. That is a huge difference"

That is only if you are interested in watching threads spin - I would ask for a 56" flat panel, if I were you!!! ;-)

It is kind of like moving sand - if it costs less money to supervise 20 people with shovels than it does to rent & use a back-hoe... the choice may be made by economics.

Jesper Frimann Posted, "it's not a coincidence that the benchmarked T5440 has 256GB of RAM, all those threads need huge amounts of memory, to be able to do some work."

That is a very interesting observation! I wonder what the memory utilization was like between the platforms? I guess that begs another question - what is more expensive: more memory chips or different CPU architecture? There are advantages and disadvantages to every approach - licensing of the applications in the environment may also have something to do with the economics.

Jesper Frimann Posted, "What I don't like about the T5XXX it is that you get the complexity of a high end box, with all those threads, without actually getting any of the benefits."

Some advantage from a high-end box achieved in the T2 line include: high throughput, partitioning at the firmware level, partitioning within the OS level, good lights-out management.

Some advantages from a low end box achieved in the T2 line include: low power consumption, fewer overall components (to fail), less rack space consumed, lower HVAC costs, less expensive & widely available industry standard peripheral components.

The servers based on the T2 line of servers are very interesting, indeed. Not good for every application, but very good for quite a few.

Various anonymous posts

Anonymous posts, "IBM has 100% right to count cores instead of sockets"

Indeed - and application vendors who license may choose Multi-Chip Module, Core, or Socket. Those application vendors have the right to count however they wish and the customer who chooses a vendor (like IBM) may have to pay a higher premium, regardless of how IBM wants to count their performance benchmarks!

Of course, Sun has the same problem, which is how some application licensing is cheaper under OpenSPARC at 4 sockets than Power and other application licensing is cheaper under Power.

Anonymous posts, "when an older SUN box needs to get replaced we can not purchase a new T2+ or any other SUN server even though it would be fine."

Seems like someone is not making a reasonable business case. One just has to make the business case to the right person.

Anonymous posts, "Why would you even want to buy a T2 or anything on Sun? Oracle will either <incomplete speculation>... The T2 is a nice low end RISC box, but as a SUN customer (well we were until this year) we our planning a migration for our Solaris boxes..."

Some reasons to buy Sun or OpenSPARC T2 platforms: maintaining existing business processes, streamlining existing business processes, transparently consolidating existing platforms (Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 migration assistant onto Solaris Containers), gaining application throughput, gaining flexibility.

Wasting money on platform architecture migration due to speculation is not incredibly wise - especially when Oracle [in a statement released to the media by the CEO] claims they make most of their money under Solaris!

It makes no fiscal sense that Oracle would kill their cash cow (Sun Solaris) and even less sense that any management in any company would assume that to be the case.

Kebabbert

It is very seldom I say this about someone posting here.

But you have absolutely no clue about the things you are talking about.

And your troll techniques are kind of infantile.

// Jesper

RE: Mr Doner

"It doesnt fight cache misses, instead it has fast access to RAM and works with another thread while waiting for data"

So if your app doesn't have lots of threads, then it does have to wait around on a Niagara CPU because fast access to RAM won't be quicker than Cache.

So I guess the question is how many threads would typically be used in the majority of mainstream applications, and does an ISV have to put in extra work (and how much effort is this) on an app that needs to be "optimised" to work with Niagara over and above Power or Itanium.

PS the comparing core to core performance is relevant for two reasons:

1. Lots of software is licensed per core

2. HP and (I think) IBM don't have to enable all the cores in a CPU,

RE: Mr Doner #

Adam 61 posts, "So if your app doesn't have lots of threads, then it does have to wait around on a Niagara CPU because fast access to RAM won't be quicker than Cache."

Yes, absolutely right. Not necessarily the right CPU for the job if the application or environment on which it sits is not well threaded.

Kebabbert posts, "Yes that is true. And it is hard to parallelize an application."

The concept that environments with common applications would not benefit from highly threaded hardware is really a myth propagated by DoS trained folks.

With DNS cache lookups, async I/O, file system syncs, multi-threaded NIC cards, VPN encryption, HTTPS encyption, compression file systems, web browsers, background processes, software update downloads, virus checking, signature checking downloads, de-duplication, backups, RSS feeds, internet radio, MP3's playing, etc. - the common user benefits tremendously as hardware become more highly threaded with a generally more responsive platform.

Even my Windows XP desktop has 74 processes running, never mind the thousands of threads!

Kebabbert posts, "A server CPU such as Niagara, is not sensitive to cache misses, thanks to it's new and radical approach."

Unfortunately, the approach is not new any longer. Sun has pioneered it, proved it, and the rest of the market has confirmed Sun's approach by scraping their old road maps and emulating Sun CoolThreads (although the market is still years behind, or less if it is a cost/performance ratio.)

I hope for Oracle that Sun has some other major development breakthrough up it's sleeve, that the rest of the market will have to backwards-engineer.

Proximity computing has extremely high potential, as a new breakthrough technology from Sun - the power savings from not having to have chips actually get soldered to a board or seated in a socket is tremendous, never mind the benefits of not having to manufacture multi-chip modules & the loss that is incurred in the manufacturing process to both chips when something goes awry.

Hang on a second

Now i've had a look at the SAP SD Benchmarks and whats very interesting to note is that the Proliant config delivered pretty much the same level of performance but with 1/4 of the memory of the SUN system.

So is the real winner here actually AMD not SUN or IBM??

T5440 = 4770 Users & 25830 SAP's

vs

DL585 = 4665 Users & 25830 SAP's

So does this highlight a weakness in the Niagara architecture vs AMD in that it requires significantly more memory to achieve similar performance to a Proliant with AMD. It would be interesting to see how the T5440 would bench with just 64GB of RAM.

Now i'm thinking the Proliant will have a significant price/performance advantage here and probably a lower cost of ownership.

Hang on a second

Sorry the Proliant benched at 25,530 SAPs - 300 less han the SUN system - a typo on my part

Still the arguement stacks up

Re:Thread vs Process

Fenton, I think you might have mixed up the threads and processes of the Operating system with the concept of processor core threads.

On for example a niagara based processor each 'processor core thread' is actually capable of running a whole separate OS image, which then again can run many processes and threads.

And I have seen the same problems when migrating to Niagara based servers as you describe.

And don't get me wrong I think Niagara is great, for what it was designed for, workloads that will perform well with many light independent threads. But there is a long way from that to a general purpose Business platform.

// Jesper

Big Brother cause:

1984 was meant as a warning, not a manual.