How to compare two Systems

[Tim Sanko]

George,

When you bought the V-2600 do you recall that the V-Class had a 550 MZ CPU and the SD had a 552MZ CPU. They were the same real speed, the 552 was to encourage you to buy a SD.

Thanks be to Carly. Glory to the Wench with a forked tongue!!!

All kidding aside, I think that either system is a step up from a V-Class, but the SD has a higher ceiling. Good fortune.

Tim

[Joshua Scott]

Well, for one thing, the 32-way rp8420 lists for over $1,200,000 US. I don't think there is any TPM ratings available yet (if there are, I would be interested in knowing what kind of ratings they get!)

TPMs (sybase):
-V2600 w/ 32 552MHz CPUs : 115,300
-SD32 w/ 32 550MHz CPUs : 195,800
-SD32 w/ 32 750MHz CPUs : 244,750
-SD32 w/ 16 750MHz CPUs : 135,509
-rp8400 w/ 16 750MHz CPUs : 140,000

As you can see, the rp8400 with only 16 CPUs beats the V2600 with twice as many. Also, notice that the SD32 with the same number/speed CPUs is a 69.8% increase in TPM rating over the V2600.

There are more factors that go into performance than just processor speed. system and memory bus speeds, cache sizes, I/O speed, to name a few. The newer servers, (rp, SD) have those advantages to give them the extra boost.

Josh

[Ted Buis]

The rp84x0 has one cross-bar to connect up to four cells together, while Superdome can have 1, 2 or 4 cross-bars to tie up to 16 cells together. Each cell is very similar for the rp8400 and for Superdome. But the pa-8800 cells have more processor and memory bandwidth than the pa8700+ (and earlier) cells. You cannot mix pa-8800 cells with older cells. Each cell (old or new) has four sockets, but the pa-8800 puts two CPUs on one chip in one socket. Before the rp8400 got the I/O expander option, only two cells could do I/O, so this limited it to two hard partitions and 1/2 the bandwidth of Superdome, but that is now not the case as the I/O expander is an option.