what the hell is a SPARC or ULTRASPARC processor?

[Chooco]

yes i know it's for Solaris but wtf is it? i mean, does it have an advantage over oh say an AthlonXP 2200+? does it do floating point operations better or something? why are they so slow like 500mhz? why would a server use 5 slow things instead of them just making 2 really fast ones?

 

[burnedout]

Originally posted by: Chooco
yes i know it's for Solaris but wtf is it? i mean, does it have an advantage over oh say an AthlonXP 2200+? does it do floating point operations better or something? why are they so slow like 500mhz? why would a server use 5 slow things instead of them just making 2 really fast ones?

1. Scalable Processor ARChitecture

2. Advantages over an Athlon XP? Although this is potential flamebait and a debatable subject; SPARC, hyperSPARC and UltraSPARC platforms have proven to be extremely stable when running Unix and some flavors of Linux. Another example is that I have recompiled a Linux kernel with dual 100 MHz hyperSPARC CPUs nearly as fast as with a dual 433 MHz Celeron setup. On the other hand, I wouldn't dare use the SPARC system for any serious gaming over the Athlon system running a comparable OS.

3. FPU? While it is generally considered a waste of electricity to run RC5 on SPARC systems, they hold their own with other applications. I know of ISPs still using 6-8 year old SPARCstations for frontends.

4. Speed? Sun has typically been behind the power curve regarding processor speed in MHz.

5. To begin with, I've never seen a SPARC system run 5 CPUs although I have seen SPARCstation 20s run three CPUs. To answer your question though, its called scalability. Think of it as four plow horses versus one or two race horses.

Read up on SPARC and Unix. You'll be glad you did

 

[Goi]

SPARC and UltraSPARCs are CPUs manufactured by Sun Microsystems. They do not run the x86 instruction set, so that's the main difference between an AMD Athlon/Intel P3/P4 CPU and it. Since its an entirely different ISA, you can't directly compare an AMD or Intel CPU to it. You can't judge its performance by its clockspeed because of this too. Its a RISC architecture with higher IPC and shorter pipelines, and is meant for servers and workstations rather than desktop apps, much like SGI processors.