VMworld

This Question is Possibly Answered

1 "correct" answer available (4 pts) 2 "helpful" answers available (2 pts)
1 Replies Last post: May 30, 2008 3:25 PM by ianr  
Click to view Tom Riddle's profile Candidate 2 posts since
Apr 30, 2008

May 29, 2008 5:51 PM

Does threading work correctly on dual core CPUs


Just gets interesting, wonder how a 4 core system running on x86 gear would compare to the performance of a nigra based SPARC system with 16 cores. I bet the performance on some of these popular applications would be comparable.

I know you guys are looking a legacy applications, but are there any price/performance numbers for todays current systems.

I would think with the lower cost of virtualization on x86 hardware and better untilzation numbers, it would be competitive to use X86 gear with a transitive layer.

It's something to think about.

Click to view ianr's profile Apprentice 8 posts since
Sep 10, 2007
1. May 30, 2008 3:25 PM in response to: Tom Riddle
Re: Does threading work correctly on dual core CPUs

QuickTransit supports multiple threads and performs very well on systems with multi-core CPUs. Since many of our customers migrate applications from legacy Solaris/SPARC servers that may be five or more years old (with UltraSPARC II processors running at a few hundred MHz), they generally find that those migrated applications run two to four times faster on a current x86-based server with dual-core or quad-core CPUs (typically running at several GHz clock speed). So in other words, the performance benefits of the latest x86 hardware far outweigh the virtualization overhead imposed by QuickTransit and VMware, which each add a (thin) abstraction layer.

Of course, if the same Solaris/SPARC application were available natively compiled for new Sun servers running the very latest and most powerful SPARC processors, then it would perform better natively than running via QuickTransit virtualization. But most of our customers find themselves in a situation where the applications they have, for one reason or another, will not run on the new-generation SPARC-based servers, without a considerable porting and recompilation effort. In some cases, the source code has been lost altogether, which means that recompilation is no longer an option.