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palladin9479 :
Search by CPU for CPU2006. T5 for the Oracle and Power 7 for the IBM. A single T5 is a 16 core chip where each core can handle 8 threads and is clocked at 3.6Ghz, has eight memory channels (per chip) and four 10Gbe circuits. You usually buy a dual socket solution but they offer quad and eight socket solutions along with single socket blades. No published M series data which is the big iron mainframe class systems.
Crazy HPC performance.
Always cool to see what the big boys are doing. Wonder how it will compare to the 16 core Ivy-E's coming out.
I found a cheat though in the fine print for T5.
"up to two threads running in each core simultaneously".
After recently reading an IBM power 7 article that's less than what IBM is doing. Their 4way SMT cores are running all 4 threads simultaneously.
http://www.dac.com/App_Content/files/49/DAC_Friedrich_20120603_slides_on_web.pdf
Slide 11
Anyhow that's just 1 aspect of the design. Sun must be making up the performance somewhere else.
Remember it's a RISC design, meaning no need for a front end instruction decoder and needing different schedulers (external and internal). Your binary code is run on bare metal, this is how they can add in all those features. You also gotta understand the nature of HPC. DT / cheap server is mostly about how many integer ops you can perform per second. HPC on the other hand is running so much stuff that chip I/O becomes incredibly important. Feeding the CPU is a greater task then actually transacting the data. This is why Oracle went with eight BoBs (their idea of a memory channel is kinda weird for us) per chip with lower speed memory vs high memory in dual channel mode. The CPU can communicate with up to eight others at 153.6 Gb/sec, this is kinda critical due to NUMA. It can execute two integer instructions per core simultaneously but it can track eight sets of code per core. This is important because of how Solaris handles threading, it tends to not move threads around unless it absolutely has to.
Anyhow a solid T5-2 (dual socket) solution looks to be $55K and includes pretty much everything you'd need except any FC components. Oracle support is stupid expensive though, we hate having to cost for that crap.