Architecture/performance difference between PA-RISC & SPARC

[Inderjit Singh_1]

I would like to know the major architecture difference between PA-RISC & SPARC.Also the performance between them.


Regards
Karthic

[Steven E. Protter]

A wee bit of reading then.

http://lists.insecure.org/lists/linux-kernel/2003/Sep/1453.html

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/176475/0

Its actually a google search so you might want to refine it a bit.

SEP

[Alzhy]

Both are RISC (Reduced Insruction Set Computing) based implementations. I don;t have the architectural details but SPARC tend to have larger caches (8MB mex currently on the UltraSparc III. Both are laggards in the Mhz race (PA-RISC topping out at 875Mhz) and SPARC at 1.26 Ghz. But it does not necessarily mean they're slow in real world applications. Performance-wise, I would say they're dead even in running real world applications but in terms of number crunching - the SPARC chip (owing to its faster clock speed) wins... You should be askinghow these chips would ware with IA64 (Itanic .. err Itanium 2.0) and current X86 chips (ie. Xeon 3.06 Ghz).. If the march to commoditization is an indication of performance comparisons, you may want to go to www.tpc.org.

[Michael Steele_2]

I think this is what you're looking for:

http://www.dl.ac.uk/CFS/benchmarks/compchem.html

For example:

Date SPECfp SPECint
1 HP Integrity RX2600/Itanium2,1500MHz 2119.0 1322.0 Jun-03 167% 158%
2 HP Integrity RX5670/Itanium2,1500MHz 2108.0 1312.0 Jun-03 167% 156%
3 HP ZX6000/Itanium2, 1.5GHz,6MB-L3, H 2106.0 1315.0 Jun-03 166% 157%
4 SGI Altix 3000 (1.5GHz, Itanium 2) 2100.0 1243.0 Jul-03 166% 148%
5 NovaScale 4040 Itanium2/1500 2015.0 1107.0 Jul-03 159% 132%
6 Dell PowerEdge 3250/1.5 GHz Itanium2 1875.0 1099.0 Jul-03 148% 131%
7 ION Computers I2X2 (1.4GHz Itanium2) 1817.0 926.0 Jul-03 144% 110%
8 SGI Altix 3000 (1.3GHz, Itanium 2) 1783.0 875.0 Jun-03 141% 104%
9 IBM eServer pSeries 690Turbo 1.7 GHz 1699.0 1113.0 May-03 134% 133%
10 IBM eServer pSeries 655 1700 MHz 1678.0 1103.0 May-03 133% 131%
11 IBM eServer pSeries 670 1.5 GHz 1520.0 981.0 May-03 120% 117%
12 IBM eServer pSeries 655 1500 MHz 1488.0 970.0 May-03 118% 116%
13 HP AlphaServer GS1280 7/1150 1482.0 877.0 Jan-03 117% 105%
14 Dell PowerEdge 3250/1.4 GHz Itanium2 1444.0 824.0 Sep-03 114% 98%
15 HP RX5670/Itanium2, 1GHz,3MB-L3, L 1431.0 - Nov-02 113% -
16 HP RX2600/Itanium2, 1GHz,3MB-L3, L 1427.0 - Nov-02 113% -
17 AMD ASUS SK8N Athlon FX-51/2.2GHz(W) 1423.0 1447.0 Sep-03 112% 172%
18 HP ZX6000/Itanium2, 1GHz,3MB-L3, L 1422.0 - Nov-02 112% -
19 SGI Altix 3000 (1GHz, Itanium 2) 1410.0 683.0 May-03 111% 81%
20 NovaScale 4040 Itanium2/1000 1404.0 719.0 Mar-03 111% 86%
21 AMD ASUS SK8N Athlon FX-51/2.2GHz(L) 1378.0 1395.0 Sep-03 109% 166%
22 HP AlphaServer ES45 68/1250 1365.0 928.0 Nov-02 108% 111%
23 PrimePower650 (SPARC64 GP/1350MHz) 1340.0 905.0 Jun-03 106% 108%
24 PrimePower900 (SPARC64 GP/1350MHz) 1322.0 892.0 May-03 104% 106%
25 HP RX5670/Itanium2, 1GHz,3MB-L3, H 1305.0 807.0 Jul-02 103% 96%
26 HP RX2600/Itanium2, 1GHz,3MB-L3, H 1301.0 810.0 Jul-02 103% 97%
27 IBM eServer pSeries 650/6M2 1450MHz 1295.0 935.0 Nov-02 102% 111%
28 AMD Rioworks HDAMA Opteron 246 / 2.0 G 1293.0 1317.0 Jul-03 102% 157%