Here Are Some Issues to Ponder January 22, 2010,
Volume 143, Issue 3
Intel or SPARC? The choice is yours, but make it an informed choice.
Are the advances in Intel processor design edging SPARC processors out of the marketplace, asks Karim Berrah in a recent SPARC or Intel? blog. He offers some points of comparison that result in a necessarily ambiguous conclusion, as each processor has advantages in its favor, according to him.
Right out of the gate, Berrah notes, the following two considerations often govern processor choice:
Intel machines are less expensive than SPARC machines
Intel machines are faster than SPARC machines
There are other factors to take into account, however:
With Intel
Two similar CPUs with different frequencies cannot work together on the same platform (no frequency mixing on the same CPU generation)
No new Intel CPU is compatible with one from the previous generation
Memory capacity is a function of the number of CPUs
Intel CPU lifetime is much shorter than SPARC CPU lifetime. As a result, an Intel box might be less expensive at the acquisition phase, but the need to refresh systems to match business needs can result in greater costs down the line.
An Intel CPU on a 2 socket system is different from an Intel CPU on a 4 or 8 socket platform, both in terms of packaging and price
- It's not the box price that matters; it's the price you pay for the same performance + cost of the complexity (manpower costs needed to manage, implement, control, change, upgrade, interconnect, power and cool). If you can, Berrah recommends choosing CPUs that deliver performance as close as possible to your application.
And SPARC?
Two similar SPARC64 CPUs with different frequencies can work together on the same platform.
A new generation SPARC64 is compatible with the one from the previous generation.
Memory capacity is not aligned with the number of sockets (SPARC64), as the memory controller is not embedded on the CPU. Half max CPU capacity with full max memory capacity is allowed.
SPARC64 CPU lifetime is longer than Intel CPU lifetime, and SPARC64 technology has advanced RAS features not yet implemented in Intel CPUs
A Solaris kernel on SPARC64 VII runs without modification on both 4 or 8 sockets, and with the Zones virtualization feature of Solaris, you can even move a zone running on SPARC64 VI to a SPARC64 VII platform, or run a zone on a collection of CPU (processor set) cores including both generations
So, which to choose?
Intel platforms are ideal for small systems (2/4 CPUs), Berrah writes, but they should be fully configured at the time of acquisition to avoid upgrade or vertical scaling problems caused by the availability issues for CPU/RAM in a timeframe longer than two years. Implementing horizontal scaling for an application is certainly less expensive than vertical scaling at the HW level, Berrah contends, but notes that, when you add all the costs of software licences needed to "implement HA" on many small boxes, plus manpower needed to maintain those small systems (provisioning, patching, monitoring, licensing, + costs to have identical HW configuration), you finally end-up with many systems, whether you upgrade in one shot, or start virtualizing on bigger systems.
For bigger systems where horizontal scaling is not an issue, and that require more than 8 sockets (whatever is the number of cores), SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a perfect platform, not only at the HW level, but also at the kernel level (Solaris), according to Berrah.
Finally, the blogger maintains, Intel platforms do not fit well in the virtualization world (frequency/generation mixing) where hypervisors are expected to be at the firmware level, or at least where hardware partitioning is possible.
In choosing which architecture to deploy, then, Berrah recommends taking the following aspects of the question into consideration:
business needs
budget (acquisition and operational costs)
evolution (yes, load and applications evolve)
plan three years out; do more with less (virtualization); be more flexible (use your actual assets)
The decision is up to you since there is no universal CPU architecture that fits data-oriented workloads (single performance), network oriented workloads (multithreaded), that scale to many CPUs in a linear way, that support virtualization, ensure binary compatibility between generations, and are cheap.
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Intel or SPARC? The choice is yours, but make it an informed choice.
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Choosing SPARC or Intel Processors
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