FYI: Current SPECfp landscape...

[Bob Drzyzgula]

All,

At my office, we use a lot of Suns, mostly AXmps that
we integrate in-house.  With the release of Sun's Ocelot
(AX2200) board, it was somewhat interesting to take a look
at the SPEC ratings of several current CPUs. SPEC isn't
the be-all and end-all of benchmarks, but we find that
our real-world applications results track it, especially
the SPECfp, pretty closely. I did this for our internal
use but I thought that y'all might find it interesting as
well. I'd welcome corrections or additions.

Caveat Emptor: This is intended as sort of a sanity check
to help think about how we are spending money. Clearly
SPEC2000 and price are only two of the myriad things that
one needs to take into consideration when purchasing
hardware; this should not be taken as a buyer's guide. For
entertainment purposes only, don't try this at home,
YMMV, etc.

The "est core $" is a guess of the dollar cost for a CPU,
motherboard and 1GB of memory.

Sorted in declining order of SPECfp2000:

Processor                   MHz  L2 KB SPi2K SPfp2K est core $
-------------------------  ---- ------ ----- ------ ----------
Alpha (21264)               833   8192   533    644  9,000 (UP2000+, est)
PA-8700                     750   N/A    603    581 14,000 (HP J6700, 2304KB L1)
Pentium 4                  1500    256   536    558  2,100 (D850GB, RDRAM)
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)   1330    256   539    445  2,000 (GA7DX, DDR SDRAM)
UltraSPARC III              750   8192   395    421  8,480 (Ocelot)
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)   1300    256   491    374    520 (A7V, PC133 SDRAM)
Pentium III (Coppermine)   1000    256   428    314  1,900 (VC820, RDRAM)
UltraSPARC II               480   8192   234    291 10,000 (AXdp)

Sorted in declining order of SPECint2000:

Processor                   MHz  L2 KB SPi2K SPfp2K est core $
-------------------------  ---- ------ ----- ------ ----------
PA-8700                     750   N/A    603    581 14,000 (HP J6700, 2304KB L1)
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)   1330    256   539    445  2,000 (GA7DX, DDR SDRAM)
Pentium 4                  1500    256   536    558  2,100 (D850GB, RDRAM)
Alpha (21264)               833   8192   533    644  9,000 (UP2000+, est)
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)   1300    256   491    374    520 (A7V, PC133 SDRAM)
Pentium III (Coppermine)   1000    256   428    314  1,900 (VC820, RDRAM)
UltraSPARC III              750   8192   395    421  8,480 (Ocelot)
UltraSPARC II               480   8192   234    291 10,000 (AXdp)

Sorted in order of increasing cost:

Processor                   MHz  L2 KB SPi2K SPfp2K est core $
-------------------------  ---- ------ ----- ------ ----------
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)   1300    256   491    374    520 (A7V, PC133 SDRAM)
Pentium III (Coppermine)   1000    256   428    314  1,900 (VC820, RDRAM)
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)   1330    256   539    445  2,000 (GA7DX, DDR SDRAM)
Pentium 4                  1500    256   536    558  2,100 (D850GB, RDRAM)
UltraSPARC III              750   8192   395    421  8,480 (Ocelot)
Alpha (21264)               833   8192   533    644  9,000 (UP2000+, est)
UltraSPARC II               480   8192   234    291 10,000 (AXdp)
PA-8700                     750   N/A    603    581 14,000 (HP J6700, 2304KB L1)

Note that the Pentium and DDR Athlon prices are quite high,
due to memory costs. The Pentium 4 is limited to RDRAM,
and the Pentium III configurations for which SPEC ratings
are avialble are also limited to RDRAM. Clearly you can
do an PIII+SDRAM system, but there are no reported SPEC
numbers for these. The DDR Athlon is probably artificially
high in price. DDR motherboards don't support more than two
or three DIMM slots, so to get the 1GB of memory one has
to use two 512MB modules. Unfortunately, these are currenty
way overpriced. RDRAM also suffers to some extent from this
problem. The following little table tells the story:

         PC133  PC1600 DDR  PC2100 DDR  PC800 RDRAM
         ------ ----------  ----------  -----------
  128MB   $ 25      $ 60       $ 50        $ 90
  256MB   $ 50      $108       $100        $210
  512MB   $110       N/A       $800        $850

Clearly, there is something anomolous about 512MB DDR memory,
and to a lesser extent 512MB RDRAM memory.

Most of the PC parts prices are coming from Pricewatch,
after scrolling down to get past the clear loss-leaders
and picking a nice, round approximate number. I wouldn't
suggest paying attention to more than about two significant
digits...

The prices for the Alpha, the AXdp and the PA-8700 are
pretty much wild-ass guesses. We have a $6K price quote
for the 480MB USII, and I'm guessing that the AXdp
motherboard and the 1GB of memory will together cost
around $4K (as I mentioned, we use AXmps, I used the AXdp
here only because it was more comparable to the other
boards in my analysis). Microway charges around $17K for a
dual-processor, 833MHz 21264, 256MB system on the UP2000+
motherboard. From this I'm guessing that the motherboard,
1GB of memory and a single 833MHz processor should cost
around $9K. I have no real good info on the PA-8700.
HP doesn't have prices for them on their website. The J6000
workstation with a 552MHz PA-8600 processor costs around
$13K.  This new processor represents a big improvement
at 750MHz.  Thus, I'm guessing that it will cost an arm
and a leg. Maybe two legs. I'm pretty sure that one cannot
buy these parts except as part of a system, so this further
reduces the value of it's inclusion in these tables.

Most of the SPEC ratings come from spec.org, a few come from
press releases.

FWIW,
--Bob