Hello Sun Managers,
Here is the summary. If anyone has more information, please let me know.
By the way, sorry for the delay.
Thanks to:
rnf@spitfire.tbird.com
poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com
birger@morgen.vet.sdata.no
<<<<< ORIGINAL QUESTION >>>>>
I need your opinion.
We are about to purchase Sun workstations, and we like to get the maximum
performance out of them. Due to our budget constraints, our target is to
purchase either SS 20 model 71s or HS21s. I understand the model 71 uses
SuperSPARC-II chip and HS21 uses hyperSPARC, and HS21 has better bench mark
numbers. I also found out that the model HS11 which is no longer available
has worse bench mark numbers than the model 71. Could anyone tell me which
is more reliable, and has better cost-performance?
<<<<< End of Original Question >>>>>
<<<<< Summary >>>>>
poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com said:
It depends on what you want to do. The Hypersparc has better Specfp
numbers, but a smaller cache than the Supersparc. The Supersparc is better
for general interactive use, whereas the Hypersparc is better for intensive
number crunching like CAD applications.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rnf@spitfire.tbird.com said:
Reliability should be no problem. We have been using 90 MHz HyperSparcs in
our Sparcstation 10's for awhile now with no problems.
The cache on the HyperSparc is not as large as the SuperSparc II so I/O
bound or memory intensive applications may run faster on the SuperSparc.
The floating point performance of the HyperSparc is better, so numerical
applications may perform better with them.
Sun has some benchmark data that they gathered when testing the chips with
various popular programs. Some ran faster on one chip, some on the other.
Your Sun rep should have that data or can get it if you are interested.
One advantage of the HyperSparc is that it doesn't use an SBUS slot for
power like the SuperSparc does. If you run several SBUS cards or want to
put 4 processors in a system this can be aproblem for the SuperSparcs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
birger@morgen.vet.sdata.no said:
CPU speed:
It depends some on Your application. HyperSparc is better on
floating-point. I'm not shure about the current figures on integer
performance, but You should definitely *not* look at clock speeds when
comparing. These are widely different architectures. (I only mention this
since so many computer magazines seem to look only at clock figures when
comparing speed).
Memory access:
For many applications this is more interesting than raw CPU speed. Since
reloading the 256K cache on HyperSparc is faster, the HyperSparc will run
faster than 1M cache SuperSparcs if Your application keeps missing even the
SuperSparc's cache (E.g. some very memory intensive apps, or apps that
access memory in manners making it impossible for the cache logic to guess
what to preload. One example would be LISP interpreters). For apps that
need a bigger cache than 256K, but manage to keep within 1M, the SuperSparc
may be faster even if the HyperSparc has better figures....
<<<<< End of Summary >>>>>
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Walrus
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:32 CDT