Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 27, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Encoding Benchmarks
Lame 3.96.1 (GCC 3.4.2)
No workstation roundup would be complete without at least a few simple encoding tests. Below, we have some content creation programs that we would commonly use in intensive workstation applications. We start off with lame 3.96.1, the de facto Linux MP3 encoder. The command to run our benchmark with a 700MB# lame 01.wav -b 192 -m s -h - > /dev/null
We use the same .wav sample file from our previous CPU benchmarks. It's important to note that lame is not multithreaded; it only utilizes one CPU at a time. We attempted to use BladeEnc and the MPI/LAM infrastructure to utilize both CPUs during the encoding, but we actually ended up with poorer performance going from one CPU to two.
Gzip 1.3.5 (Binary)
We took the same 700MB file from the lame encoding test and compressed it using gzip using the following command.# time gzip 01.wav -c >/dev/null
Again, you can see how gzip performed in our previous Linux CPU roundup. Even though we use the same test file, our other Athlon 64 2.4GHz components perform slightly better. There are two main reasons for this: gzip is not a multithreaded compression utility and we receive a performance hit from the SMP kernel, and unbuffered memory on the Socket 939 runs slightly faster.
mgzip 1.2b (GCC 3.4.2)
Using an SMP implementation of gzip called mgzip, we were able to achieve much faster compression times. By default, we expect mgzip to utilize both CPUs. The command used is below:# time mgzip 01.wav -c > /dev/null
When we increased the thread count, we actually achieved even better performance (approximately 27 seconds when specifying 4 threads). By contrast, you can see that the program performs very similarly to gzip when only utilizing one thread (and thus, 1 CPU).
# time mgzip -c -t 1 01.wav >/dev/null
MEncoder 1.0pre5
Finally, we have also included a quick sample of our MPEG2 encoding benchmark. MEncoder 1.0pre5 is part of the MPlayer package and was compiled using GCC 3.4.2 using default flags.
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mino - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
#5 I would, putting aside the fact I could not afford one. :(Even despite I'm running Tyan Tiger MP on Fedora C2 ;)
meatless - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Maybe it was just done for some sort of comparison baseline, but who would actually use RedHat 9 on a brand new dual Opteron workstation?jbond04 - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Hey Kris, great job on the review. I wanted to let you know that I was pleasantly surprised by your thermal graphs for the inside of the case. I think they're a great idea; and I've never seen them before anywhere else. Keep up the good work.-Scott
Reflex - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I notice that this system is nearly identical to the IBM Intellistation that just arrived on my test bench today. Even the motherboard is identical, as well as the case(exterier looks a bit different, but interier is the same).Makes me wonder if Sun and IBM are actually building these, or outsourcing them to a third party and sticking thier label on them
phaxmohdem - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Just when I was complaining of no top teir dual opteron workstations. It's a shame that the way I'd like it configured costs 18,000 bones. Guess it will just be a pipe dream for a while more. God help our wallets when they release the w4100z Quad opteron workstation ;)Denial - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I like to give one a test drive myself, but I'll let others be the guinea pigs.madeira - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link
good nightWhere can I find the BIOS (donwload) to update,
The oracle - no longer provides soporte.
I need physical BIOS or software update
Could you help me please!