On Tue, 25 Sep 2001 16:30:40 -0500 (Central Daylight Time),
[log in to unmask] wrote:

>Our new friend, Martin "the demise of MPE" Garvey may be at it again.
>
>The following is a piece in Information Week's daily newsletter. Following
>the first link, "Lowdown On The High End" (which took two people to write,
>Garvey and another), the article there states (or misstates) that superdome
>"features up to 64 CPUs". Um, well, according to
><http://www.hp.com/products1/unixservers/highend/superdome/specifications.ht
>ml#capacity>, its capacity is "64-way 750MHz, 4-way superscalar PA-8700
>CPUs". My math squares with my memory, that superdome supports 256 CPUs,
>more than 15K's 106 processors.

The PA-8700 is a 4-way superscalar CPU. There are maximum of 64 such
CPU's in a single Superdome node. A single Superdome cabinet can
contain 32 CPU's and 128GB of memory. Adding a second cabinet takes
you up to 64 CPU's and 256GB memory.

4-way superscalar, means, I think, that there are 4 "stages" in the
execution pipline of the CPU, so up to 4 instructions can be loaded in
the execution pipeline at one time, each one at a different stage of
execution.

Note that the 106-CPU config on the Sun is only possible by
sacrificing some I/O slots.







I don't know enough about superdome to know
>if "up to 128GB memory per cabinet" (hp) compares to the "256 Gbytes of
>memory" in the linked article, but perhaps someone else here does know. If
>superdome support eight of these  cabinets, that's 1TB of memory. So, is the
>Sun Fire 15K "bigger" than superdome?
>
>And I wonder about other comparisons?
>
>** Sun's New Unix Server Is Biggest Yet
>
>Sun Microsystems' new Solaris Unix-based server, the Sun Fire
>15K, is the biggest Unix server yet. It will scale to as many as
>106 processors in a single frame, has a terabyte of memory, and
>can attach up to five petabytes of exterior storage. And the 15K
>is designed to be easier to maintain and manage than previous
>Unix servers. Most important for Sun, however, is that the 15K
>will become another lure as Sun tries to win over more IBM
>customers.
>
>The 15K reduces the latency usually associated with big Unix
>systems with processors that share the same memory and
>input/output. Sun has also enhanced Domains, which was introduced
>in the 15K's predecessor, the E 10000. Domains allowed users to
>run multiple workloads, but users had to program them ahead of
>time and stick with them during operations. The 15K's Dynamic
>System Domains lets users rearrange the partitions on the fly. In
>addition, features in the Solaris operating system let users
>modify software without taking the system down. The 15K will be
>available in November priced from $1.4 million for 16 processors
>to $10 million for 106 processors. - Martin J. Garvey
>
>Read on at
>Lowdown On The High End
>http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eEd60BdJZN0V20Pn20AE
>
>IBM Offers Peek At Next-Generation Unix Server
>http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eEd60BdJZN0V20RT10An
>
>Copyright 2001 CMP Media. A service of InformationWeek.
>
>--------
>Greg Stigers
>http://www.cgiusa.com
>
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