Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U

by Kristopher Kubicki on 2/22/2005 12:05 AM EST
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  • tironside - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link

    I agree with dwnwrd. the lom part of it is not great for remote console etc. the lom that the hp stuff has is pretty slick, with a java / web interface. The other main problem I have with this is it offers only raid 1 unless you buy a rather expensive add on card to do raid 5, kind of a teaser to put 6 drive bays and only let you do raid 1... It's a good start, but sun needs to make some changes before it can go mission critical. (raid and lom enhancements imho) while I like cli stuff, trying to get junior people to do complicated cli stuff is dangerous...

  • dwnwrd - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link

    I have some V20s and a V40. The service processor is pretty great except if you try to direct the Linux serial console to it then connect to the "serial over LAN" you'll get a flood of "serial8250: too much work for irq4" and a sleepy system.

    http://supportforum.sun.com/hardware/index.php?t=m...
  • Pontius - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link

    I am curious what they are using when they benchmark the linux kernel compile times. They use the time command which spits out three times - real, user & sys. Are they using the sum of all these? If not, something is wrong. Because I did the same test, on the same 2.6.4 kernel using -j2 on a dual 2.8GHz Nocona system and I got a "real" time of 147s. That doesn't seem right because the Opterons are way faster at compilation. On the other hand, if I take the sum of the 3 times, I get 420s. Any thoughts?

  • jlee123 - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link

    RedHat 9, are you joking!!?? This has got to be a mistake, I can't understand how Sun could be shipping a 64-bit server with a 32-bit OS that's reached End Of Life. It's the equivalent of buying a workstation with Windows ME on it. Also, there was never a official port of RH9 to x86-64, the first x86-64 RedHat was RHEL3, the Fedora team later released FC1 x86-64. If Sun doesn't wish to pay licensing, they'd be better off shipping with FC2, FC3 or CentOS, a free rebuild of RHEL. This hardware isn't even going to begin to be utilized till it's running something more modern like RHEL4 x86-64.
  • JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link

    I could think of one use for these. :)

    http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=...
  • lauwersw - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link

    Standard rule for parallel make is to use 2xnumber of processors available. This gives most optimal results to hide disk latencies and seems to be correct in most cases I've seen.
  • phaxmohdem - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link

    Call me what you will, but I would like to see some quad/dual Xeon scores to compare to as well (along with price tages for comparison :) )

    And yes, If I were a rich man who knew what to do with that much computing power, I would have a dozen of these babies in my basement! Who needs women anymore once you have 48 Opteron x50 or x52 cpus humming at your disposal. And drool core? Ahhhhhhhhhhh.
  • JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    That thing is a BEAST.

    I have no idea what I'd do with a computer like that.
  • MrEMan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Kristopher,

    Thanks for the clarification about the reduced media tag.

    E
  • KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    RyanVM: The system used 850s.

    Kristopher
  • RyanVM - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Did anybody else find it confusing that the reviewed system had CG-stepping Opteron 850s and Kris brought up E4-stepping Opteron 852s on multiple occasions? What CPUs were actually in the system?
  • SUOrangeman - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Last page, ..

    "Sun has a speed **daemon** on their hands, ..."

    Freudian slip, hehe? Nice read nonetheless.

    -SUO
  • KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    MrEMan: Mediaplex is just an advertising server. Some advertisers (like NewEgg) host their banners on Mediaplex so they don't destroy their bandwidth. Sometimes when an ad campaign is hitting too many impressions the Mediaplex tag will revert to a 2x2 or a 1x1 pixel so that they don't harm their click through rates. It has nothing to do with spyware or malware or adware.

    Kristopher
  • MrEMan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Anandtech,

    What is with the 1/16" x 1/16" graphic (1280x1024 resolution on a 19" CRT monitor) for adfarm.mediaplex.com ?

    Is it there with your permission or did someone hack your site?

    If it is there with your permission, I must say I am surprised that you would put such stealth adware garbage links on your site.
  • jcourtney - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    I'd love to see some benchmarks with Solaris instead of or vs. Linux for reference too. Nice read though as usual.
  • ElFenix - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    "particularly considering the fact that the V40z does not utilize any active cooling directly on their CPU heat sinks"

    whoa, proper spelling of heat sink!

    now i'm going to harp on the fact that blowing air across a radiator with a fan is not active cooling. air conditioning is active cooling, turning on the ceiling fan is not.

    =)

    nice read
  • Hikari - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    I wish I could see a comparison of this and that Quad Opteron HP server. I have the HP one budgeted for this year already... (we're also a Sun shop).

    I didn't see an option for 15k RPM drives though. I could put in like 5-146GB@15k RPM in the HP which was one reason I was leaning towards it.
  • lihoyin - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Looking forward for a comparsion with HP DL585 / DL 385, both are also Monsters!
  • Sunner - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Googer, that's true, Sun basically just rebadges Newisys servers, the same is true of the V20Z, in fact IIRC you can actually find some Newisys marks left on the servers :)

    Anyway, Kris, any chance of a couple of benchmarks with a 2.6 based distro?
    2.6 has, among other things, good NUMA support, something that would be nice to have when running a 4-way Opteron ;)

    //Sunner
  • dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Another 250/850 typo on page 3: "Below, you can see one of the Opteron 250s is exposed from under the copper heat sink on the daughterboard."

  • dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Typo page 1: "In January, Sun sent us a V40z demonstration unit that was complete with four Opteron 250s and 8GB of PC2700."

    It should be "four Opteron 850's"

    Also, page 3: "The older 130nm "CG" stepping on Opteron 8xx only allows for PC2700 memory"

    This is not true, generally. I don't know about the v40z, but CG Opterons can use PC3200 no problem.

    See here, for example: http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2004q3/...

  • Ardan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    I agree with #16. Fantastic work, Kristopher! I have a family member that works for a division of Lockheed-Martin and they are dealing with Sun more and more now and he enjoys your articles when I show them to him. He said a few weeks ago that he shows some of these articles to co-workers because of the thorough evaluations and it is helping them to decide whether or not to outfit their systems with Serial ATA drives (for Destroyers) and now with Opteron systems from Sun.

    Good work! ;)
  • tfranzese - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Excellent work Kris.
  • KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Something is wrong with the DB graphs: i am fixing it now.

    Kristopher
  • Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    http://www.newisys.com/products/4300.html
  • Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    This server is aperantly made by Nhttp://www.newisys.com/products/4300.html
  • Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    OOPS, this is suppost to go where the blank post is.

    To the author or whom it may concern: A bad link is located on page 3 and reads:

    two Samsung 1GB PC2700 – link to Samsung.jpg>
  • Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

  • Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    I want Game Benchmarks too! (just for fun though)
  • nourdmrolNMT1 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    database benchmarks arent workin here either.

    MIKE
  • RadeonGuy - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    I Wish I Had One

    *drool*
  • Ahkorishaan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    That thing is a monster! I can't even think of something to do with that much power... It would be wasted on anything I throw at it, that's for sure. Good thing I don't have 22,000 to throw away...
  • Viditor - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Wow...what a machine! I'd read the pathscale record setting previously, but it looks like HP has a real headache here...(Dell isn't even in the game...)
  • Doormat - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Yea the benchmarks are missing. I'd also like to see some reviews of "cheaper" (by an order of magnitude or so) 1U/2U 1/2-way systems. It'll be interesting to see what happens when dual core goes live later this year. I'd love to get some 1U 2-way servers and stick dual core chips in them. 4 procs in a 1U housing. Yeah. Baby.
  • bersl2 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    #3: On the contrary. PPC runs embedded all the time.
  • mickyb - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    They don't work for me either. On another note, the PowerPC management board is interesting. I am familiar with the HP Integritry Management Board. I don't think it runs Linux. I wonder if AMD would be interested in making a management board based on the Geode processor. PowerPC seems a bit much.
  • vaystrem - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    Are the database benchmark images not working for anyone else?
  • LeadFrog - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link

    That is a beast.

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