FYI: Current SPECfp landscape...

[Bob Drzyzgula]

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 06:19:52PM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> 
> This isn't to complain about your ranking -- I think it is very useful
> and one does have to create some sort of standard in order to compare
> price performance.  It is just to note that if one's application DOESN'T
> use a GB of core the price/performance rankings can signficantly change
> because of the nonlinearities in the cost space.

Robert,

Good point. I had focused on 1GB configurations because
that's what we are currently using at work, to support
some huge, memory-hungry jobs. I took a stab at readjusting
for 512MB configurations (768MB gets to be a hassle to do
in highly interleaved systems like the UltraSPARC). This
table is a bit shakier than the last ones because I don't
have good data for the smaller memory configurations
on the UltraSPARCs, and, as I pointed out previously,
the Alpha and HP prices are WAGs anyway. Not that precise
data on these is likely to change the rankings much, but
does anyone have better pricing info for these that they
can share? Anyway, this is what I came up with, sorted
only by Sfp2K/K$:

Core$ is for MB + CPU + 512MB memory

Processor                  MHz    L2   Si Sfp core $ Sfp/K$ Notes
-------------------------- ----  ---- --- --- ------ ----  -------------------
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)   1300   256 491 374    400  935  (A7V, PC133 SDRAM)
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)   1330   256 539 445    600  742  (GA7DX, DDR SDRAM)
Pentium 4                  1700   256 586 608    900  676  (D850GB, RDRAM)
Pentium III (Coppermine)   1000   256 428 314    700  449  (VC820, RDRAM)
Alpha (21264)               833  8192 533 644  8,500   76  (UP2000+, est)
UltraSPARC III              750  8192 395 421  7,500   56  (Ocelot)
PA-8700                     750       603 581 13,500   43  (HP J6700, 2304KB L1)
UltraSPARC II               480  8192 234 291  9,000   32  (AXdp)

--Bob

PS, BTW, FYI & FWIW, for those of you with a sense of
deja-vu, the message Robert just responded to was in fact
essentially a duplicate of one I sent before, only it came
from my office address rather than my personal address.
I had done a reply instead of a forward so that I could
edit the content (I have mutt set to forward messages
as mime attachments), but then I forgot to take the beowulf
address off.  I thought the message was dead because my
work address isn't subscribed to the list. I sent mail
to the admin address asking that it be deleted rather than
approved, but I guess that it got approved and posted
anyway. :-(