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

[Sridhar Ayengar]

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.

Well, the POWER architecture has been well-known for some time for 
having heavy floating-point balls.  These chips tend to issue and retire 
multiple floating-point instructions per clock, and they tend to have a 
reasonably fast clock.

Peace...  Sridhar