Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 27, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
3D Rendering Benchmarks
Mental Ray 3.3.1 (binary)
Just as Viewperf is our definitive synthetic benchmark, MentalRay has been our long time rendering standard. MentalRay was actually first developed on Sun machines during its early stages, and it's interesting to see that we have come full circle to testing MR on an x86_64 machine designed by Sun. Keep in mind, we are running the 32-bit binaries developed by Alias Wavefront. You may be interested to see how some single CPU setups perform on the same test render here. Once again, we are running the same Maya benchmark file found in our other reviews. We ran MentalRay via Maya using the command below:# maya_render_with_mr - file Benchmark_Mental.mb
MentalRay scales very nicely on the SMP Opteron machine. You will notice a 40% increase in performance from our single CPU Athlon FX-53 in our Linux CPU Roundup, although we are running a slightly newer kernel in this analysis.
POV-Ray 3.6 (binary & GCC 3.4.2)
Below, you can see how a non-commercial single CPU renderer performs on our machine. A separate add-on for POV-Ray, such as SMPOV, is needed to enable multiprocessor support. We ran two tests of POV-Ray here, the first being the 32-bit binary package from POVRay, and the second being the compiled binary. Obviously, the compiled binary defaults to 64-bit on systems capable of such.
Surprisingly, POV-Ray does OK on 32-bit Solaris 10, mildly outpacing the 32-bit Linux compilation. We could be in for a real treat when Solaris shows up on the x86_64 architecture.
YafRay 0.0.7 (binary)
Blender's raytracer, YafRay, constitutes another cornerstone of Linux workstation performance. We are only running the 32-bit YafRay binaries instead of compiling from source. We rendered the blurref sample included with Blender as follows:# time yafray blurref_sample.xml
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
mino - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
#5 I would, putting aside the fact I could not afford one. :(Even despite I'm running Tyan Tiger MP on Fedora C2 ;)
meatless - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Maybe it was just done for some sort of comparison baseline, but who would actually use RedHat 9 on a brand new dual Opteron workstation?jbond04 - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Hey Kris, great job on the review. I wanted to let you know that I was pleasantly surprised by your thermal graphs for the inside of the case. I think they're a great idea; and I've never seen them before anywhere else. Keep up the good work.-Scott
Reflex - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I notice that this system is nearly identical to the IBM Intellistation that just arrived on my test bench today. Even the motherboard is identical, as well as the case(exterier looks a bit different, but interier is the same).Makes me wonder if Sun and IBM are actually building these, or outsourcing them to a third party and sticking thier label on them
phaxmohdem - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Just when I was complaining of no top teir dual opteron workstations. It's a shame that the way I'd like it configured costs 18,000 bones. Guess it will just be a pipe dream for a while more. God help our wallets when they release the w4100z Quad opteron workstation ;)Denial - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I like to give one a test drive myself, but I'll let others be the guinea pigs.madeira - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link
good nightWhere can I find the BIOS (donwload) to update,
The oracle - no longer provides soporte.
I need physical BIOS or software update
Could you help me please!