Sun uses three CPUs as the basis for its products: SPARC VI and VII, SPARC T1 and T2, and x86. Choosing the best CPU, in the best system, to solve a problem is more challenging the more choices there are. Frequently, I’ll be asked to recommend a best-fit solution. Sometimes, I’ll need to debug the performance of a system to determine where its bottlenecks are and if it is the best-fit for the workload. Frequently the “T” CPUs are used in the wrong environment, causing users and sysadmins to be unhappy with the provided performance.

In this blog entry I’ll talk about how to determine whether a given workload will run well on Sun’s T servers (the servers that use the T CPUs).

The T servers have one to four sockets. Each socket holds a CPU with up to eight cores. The CPUs currently range up to 1.4GHZ in clock rate. Each core can have eight “hot” threads, in that eight threads can be making progress on the CPU without the system performing a context switch. However, there are not 8 computation engines per core. Rather, each of the eight threads is round-robin scheduled on the core. For details of the architecture of the Niagara CPUs take a look at the Sun Niagara page. An architecture diagram of a single socket of Niagara II CPU is shown here for easy reference.

These T system CPUs are more than just integer units, adding to the expectations of stellar functionality. Each chip also includes eight cryptographic accelerators and eight floating point units, in some configurations the systems also have dual 10-Gb ethernet ports. Finally, Logical Domains, or LDOMS, are an included virtualization technology that allows at the maximum a virtual machine per thread. The T systems have won many benchmarking records, including world record single socket SPEC integer and floating point benchmarks. So what could go wrong?
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Why is there such a buzz among the analyst, press, and blogging community that Oracle is going to sell of the Sun hardware business? It makes no sense to me. I shared my thoughts on the acquisition in a previous post, but I am going to elaborate a bit here. Not only do I believe Oracle will continue selling Sun hardware, I think it is the primary reason they bought Sun.

Why would Oracle spend $7.4B to buy Sun? Is it for Solaris? I don’t think so. Solaris is open source and Sun would have welcomed Oracle’s help in tuning the operating system for Oracle’s software applications. Is it for Java? That is a little more plausible, but there was no need for Oracle to control Java. As far as I know, Sun was not doing anything to make it difficult for Oracle to use Java. Oracle is buying Sun for the hardware business. The hardware (and support) business is what generates the revenue at Sun.

I would like to share a few relevant quotes. The first comes from Larry Ellison in a recent interview. He did his best to shut down the rumor mill churning on what will happen to Sun’s hardware business.

Interviewer – “Are you going to exit the hardware business?”

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As promised previously, we’ve posted the second FAQ. The Solaris System Analysis FAQ is now live. The purpose of this FAQ is to provide details on how to determine the cause of a performance, reliability, or functionality problem of a Solaris system. There is a link to the new FAQ in the menu bar on the blog front page. If any of the data is inaccurate, please email. If there is something missing, send the question along and we will take a look at it.