On 10/12/07, Ken Mandelberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> How does the new T5120 stack up as a Sunray server for typical
> gnome/firefox/thunderbird/soffice (and in our case matlab) desktops?
>
> In particular, how would it compare to an X4150. An 8 core version is
> about 1/4 the price of the 8 core T5120.
The performance of most desktop apps is dominated by
single-thread CPU performance. The X4150 beats the pants
off the T5120 in that department. Firefox and Thunderbird
are typically limited by the network but will still feel faster on
an X4150, while soffice and matlab should be measurably
faster -- if there was such a thing as matlab for Solaris x86.
AFAIK it's not available.
The T can be the better choice if the machine is very
heavily loaded ('uptime' consistently shows more runnable
jobs than the machine can execute concurrently) but that's
not a good situation to be in for a Sun Ray server in the first
place. It's also a less power-hungry machine.
> Right now we have 8 cores via 2 V440's. Would either of the above be a
> vast improvement?
That depends on what the limiting factors are on the V440s.
If it's just CPU performance rather than, say, insufficient
RAM leading to massive paging then, in broad terms:
- I'd expect the X4150 to be noticeably faster, and
- I'd expect the T5120 to be noticeably slower unless your
V440s are running with very high load averages, in which
case the extra threading might outweigh the slower
single-thread performance.
The other thing to watch out for on the X is that the applications
you need are available for x86. The most generally painful gap
there is Adobe's Acrobat reader, although the opensource
readers are getting better and better at filling that gap. In your
case, the absence of matlab might be an important factor. You
might want to keep the V440s around to run the SPARC build
of matlab.
Both the T5120 and the X4150 should be available under the
try-and-buy program (http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/) sometime
soon. if you aren't in a tearing hurry then that would let you
exercise the things in your environment before you take the
plunge and write the purchase order.
OttoM.
__
ottomeister
Disclaimer: These are my opinions. I do not speak for my employer.
_______________________________________________
SunRay-Users mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
