Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 27, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Conclusions
Sun is a high end name, and with a high end price, you also get high end service and documentation. Sun has an excellent forum and user community, although discussions regarding Opteron workstations are fairly limited thus far. Solaris and JDS have their own unique support systems and user communities as well.The thermal and sonic performance of the w2100z can only be described as a design win. Although Sun sacrifices our ability to incorporate multiple hard drives into the workstation by permitting only two (safely), we passively cool the entire rig well within thermal thresholds. The result is an extremely quiet workstation.
While we enjoyed out first look at the Sun w2100z, all of our testing and analyses are without a competitive solution to use for comparison. We expect this article to be the first in a set of many Linux/BSD based workstations, and we are excited about getting the Sun w2100z some competition - particularly since the next iteration of 2.6GHz Opteron processors are on the way. As you may have noticed, almost all of our benchmarks are platform independent as well; don't be surprised if an EM64T Linux, 64-bit Windows or Mac system competes head-to-head with our Sun in the future.
Although we only had a few benchmarks of Solaris 10 in this analysis, we hope to include more in the future, particularly when Janus support is fully integrated into the kernel. Thus far, we have not run enough tests on Solaris to provide conclusive results on performance.
There were no instances where the w2100z performed poorer than our whitebox configuration, including sonic and thermal testing. Let's consider how pricing modifies our final thoughts. Looking through NewEgg for each of the components used in our whitebox configuration, we made the chart below.
| Whitebox | Sun w2100z | |
| Opteron 250 | $854.00 | |
| Opteron 250 | $854.00 | |
| Tyan K8S Pro | $490.00 | |
| Kingston 1GB DDR | $314 | |
| Kingston 1GB DDR | $314 | |
| Kingston 1GB DDR | $314 | |
| Kingston 1GB DDR | $314 | |
| Quanta Altas 73GB | $250.00 | |
| GeForce Quadro FX3000 | $1,300.00 | |
| Keyboard | $20 | |
| Mouse | $20 | |
| CDR Drive | $40 | |
| Case, Power Supply | $200 | |
| Approximate Total | $5,284.00 | $8,695.00 |
Keep in mind that the Tyan K8S Pro comes with an integrated Adaptec dual channel SCSI adaptor and Broadcom gigabit Ethernet. Our whitebox configuration weighs in almost $3,000 cheaper than our Sun workstation, although this may be a bit misleading - we are not comparing apples to apples here. The whitebox Opteron system is a noisy rackmount server, and the w2100z is a high performance premium workstation. The w2100z comes with Sun backed support and software updates (not to mention free JDS), and our whitebox configuration is not even guaranteed to work under Linux.
Apple systems work well because they were designed from the beginning to work with each other. The same can be said for the Sun configuration. Heatsinks, CPU mezzanine, daughterboards are all designed and configured to work with each other, and as a result, we see higher performance, lower thermals and quiet cooling. IBM's IntelliStation A Pro 6224 (with a similar configuration) costs just $8500 with dual Opteron 248's installed; it is not available with the faster 2.4GHz Opteron 250's featured on the w2100z. HP does not offer Opteron workstations yet, although pricing out an equivalent 4U rackmount server with the same options runs in the five-digit figures. Sun does not pre-install the OS on its workstation like some of its competitors, but it is guaranteed to work with Solaris and RedHat distributions. Other solutions like Appro are priced competitively with the w2100z, but can't provide support infrastructure that we have with Sun. Ironic as it sounds, Sun is the inexpensive leader in Opteron workstation design. However, keep in mind that upgrading components for a workstation like the w2100z requires you to go through Sun (if you want to continue receiving support) - which can be costly.
There was a time when embracing Linux and x86_64 were two things that nobody expected from Sun. Memories of SGI's unwillingness to adapt to competitive (although probably not as efficient) architectures and operating systems remain fresh in everyone's minds. The lack of x86_64 Solaris and JDS thus far both indicate that Sun's interests in 64-bit SPARC are still prevalent, but small steps are better than no steps at all.
Ultimately, AMD and Sun benefit together in this new architecture endeavor. Sun and AMD research teams work closely together, and as a result, Sun can produce excellent workstations while AMD gains insight on processor and thermal design. PA-RISC, Power4 and SPARC architectures all have significant advantages over the x86 platform, with the exception of price. Seeing Sun, HP and IBM working together with AMD to advance x86 benefits us all in bringing affordable 64-bit computing to everyone.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
t - Thursday, October 28, 2004 - link
oh... i better clarify before i get labelled as a 'zealot' or a 'mac hater' or a 'pc lover'by 'cache starved' i mean that the power4 is _very_ dependent upon its cache architecture, take some of that away and u of course impact performance... a power4 and a G5 at the same clockspeed, the power4 wins. The G5 is still an impressive chip.
t.
t - Thursday, October 28, 2004 - link
heh...this thread is hilarious...can u ppl like talk past each other some more?please :)
G5 = cut down, somewhat cache starved power4
Blue Gene/L = power4+
they are a fair bit different: l3, l2, altivec, dual v. single core...just for a couple.
gromm - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
"and I'm sure that there's nothing special about the way the G5's were linked... "Actually, they have a communication network based on InfiniBand, which isn't something that you'd buy for home (especially considering how much it costs). The cards themselves are $200+ each (in quantities of 10,000 for the only price I could find for their HCA cards) and I can't even find how much the switches cost (I'm sure several thousand dollars each).
Reflex - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Thanks for the correction, its been a while since I read up on that stuff. However you still illustrated my point that this is pretty much an irrelevant benchmark for general purpose computing. People do not simply use thier PC's for floating point performance...slashbinslashbash - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Reflex: "First off, once again, you are misunderstanding what you are looking at. Total number of CPU's is only part of the equation. There are *many* factors that go into the 'most powerful supercomputer' equation. How much memory and what type/speed? How are they linking the individual nodes? What kind of software optimizations have been done, and what software is being used to benchmark it?"Wrong. The top supercomputers are rated solely by FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second, as I'm sure you know) as measured by the Linpack benchmark. See www.top500.org. I've never heard of memory having an impact on FLOPS; I guess it *could* if you absolutely starved the CPUs of work, but presumably all of these computers are balanced enough that the RAM can keep up with the CPUs. The nodes can be linked in any way; presumably they're linked optimally for price/performance, and I'm sure that there's nothing special about the way the G5's were linked... you don't build a supercomputing cluster and let the linking drag the performance down. As for the optimization question, I'm not sure but I'll bet Linpack is optimized for every platform/architecture.
Reflex - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I have not been arguing about superiority for the PC platform. My point is that they are not directly comparable as related to this particuliar review. The product being reviewed does not have an equivilent on the Mac side of things, so going on about how this article proves that the 'price' arguement is wrong is rediculous.My original question has not been answered, and that is that I am wondering who is building these since I have an identical workstation here on my lab bench but with an IBM label on it.
karlreading - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
enuff of the mac vs. pc B$ dudes!!!this is a comments section about a opteron workstation, not about how a g5 spanks / get spanked by opterons ass.
that said there is one part of this that gets me excited. Whilst coming across mac / pc arguments on forums, i have noticed one trend. AMD is now always the PC's defender. i never hear anybody citing the p4 / xeon as a mac comparison. its always opteron / a64 vs. g5. this is excellent news from AMD's standpoint, as it cements the trend that AMD is a respectable company, and also is impressive to see AMD as the lead PC saviour in the ongoing annoying "my pc's better than your mac " debate. Intel should be worried, very very worried. never thaught id see the day when my beloved AMD were championing the pc / x86 cause :)
gromm - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
As far as cost, I'd like to see how much Apple (and other sponsors) subsidized X. The networking infrastructure it has alone would normally be massively expensive and I can't see how it fits into the $10M pricetag quoted by them along with all compute hardware.From benchmarks I have run, the G5 and the Athlon64 are neck-to-neck in performance (actually the difference is small enough to be noise) in 'normal' codes (mostly FPU) and the Athlons are a little faster in integer performance. I haven't seen what Altivec/SSE2 optimizations would do for either.
If you want some rough estimates, go to Ars Technica and look in the Battlefront forum under the Cinebench thread. There are lots of scores under there to compare for this benchmark (includes a raytracer and some other stuff).
michael2k - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I'd like to see Anand run SpecViewPerf on his Dual G5, now :)Reflex - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I am aware of Apple's 'server' aspirations. That does not change anything at all. They do not have the kind of corporate support Sun or other large venders provide, and as a result the Xserve is not a large player in the market. Furthermore, its only proof that your comparing the wrong product to the Sun product this review was about. Xserve was designed to compete with workstations like this, not the PowerMac which is a desktop system.My comment about Sun relates to the fact that for a long time they were a detriment to the industry at a whole, pushing concepts like Java PC's with no local storage, trying to keep prices very high, and generally siding with 'Big Iron' in the market rather than embracing the future. In the past year, as Microsoft/Intel/AMD have made the Sparc obsolete they have had to get with the program, choosing AMD as their partner made perfect sense as they had no motivation to improve Intel's position considering they are still competing with them in some markets.
In summation, Sun is finally seeing the light, however their past is one of high prices, legal shennanigans(especially in Europe where price fixing has been a common charge against them), and a strategy of defining themselves as Microsoft/Intel's opposition rather than charging their own course. The future will tell where they go, and I'll cross my fingers and hope that x86 Solaris and Opteron workstations are a sign that they are finally producing products their customers demand, rather than locking them into a model and then telling them what they need...