Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation

The Test

Testing the w2100z is difficult, since there are very few dual Opteron 250 rigs on the market right now. We had the opportunity to set up a dual Opteron 250 workstation using store-bought components for our tests. This will likely change as more Tier 1 workstation companies start working closer with AMD. The majority of our tests are conducted in the same manner as our Linux CPU and GPU tests in the past. Since this is a workstation, we want to focus the majority of our benchmarks on applications that we would use in a workstation: compiling, rendering and encoding tests.

We took various benchmarks that we are familiar with and ran them on various configurations of the w2001z. As we mentioned earlier, the w2100z does not come pre-installed with any operating system. As a result, we took several different operating systems (Solaris 10, JDS 2.0, RedHat 9, SuSE 9.1) with similar gcc/kernels and benchmarked our programs on them. For reference, we took our off-the-shelf Opteron 250 rig and ran the same benchmarks on it using SuSE 9.1 as well. Although we upgraded the GCC libraries and glibc for the JDS 2.0 configuration, we did not change the kernel - JDS was designed around the 32-bit SMP Linux 2.4 kernel, and upgrading/hacking it would put us well outside the scope of the analysis. As we will see in the next few pages, performance on the proven 2.4 kernel is actually surprisingly good!

Finding properly threaded applications on Linux that are capable of taking advantage of multiple CPUs is a difficult task. While lots of server applications are designed for multiple threads, as the need for multiple users exist, applications that fully utilize multiple processors in a single user environment are difficult to come by. This makes it very challenging for us to benchmark applications effectively using multiple processors. Almost all of our benchmarks only utilize a single CPU unless stated otherwise.

All of our tests take place in the 64-bit environment, with the exception of the JDS rig. Although there is nothing to prevent us from running on 32-bit operating systems, (most) of our applications are mature enough to take a performance hit in a 64-bit environment.

Performance Workstation Configurations
Processor(s):	(2) AMD Opteron 250 (130nm, 1MB L2, Socket 94)
RAM:	4 x 1024MB Buffered ECC PC-3200 CL3 (400MHz)
Motherboards:	Sun K85AE	Tyan K8W S2885ANRF
Hard Drives	SCSI u320 Seagate Cheetah 10,000RPM	SCSI u320 Quantum Atlas 10,000RPM
Memory Timings:	Default
Video Card(s):	GeForce QuadroFX 3000
Operating System(s):	SuSE 9.1 Professional RedHat 9 JDS 2.0 Solaris 10	SuSE 9.1 Professional
Kernel:	Linux 2.6.8 Linux 2.4 (JDS 2.0) SunOS 5.10 s10_63 (Solaris 10)
Compiler:	linux:~ # gcc -v Reading specs from /usr/local/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.2/specs Configured with: ./configure Thread model: posix gcc version 3.4.2
Drivers:	NVIDIA Linux 1.0-6111

The majority of the differences between these two systems result from different motherboards and slightly different hard drives. Most of our benchmarks do not particularly stress hard drive IO, and focus more on CPU and memory IO. Generally, we average three passes of our results unless stated otherwise. Variance is noted, if above 2%.