David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on August 5, 2012 3:49 pm wrote:
> > > Oracle keep supporting the (far slower) M-series SPARC?
>
> Honestly,
> the 'Itanium has bad performance' excuse makes no sense. It's definitely faster
> than Niagara and potentially the Fujitsu M-series.

Potentially!? What it supposed to mean? Wait for Poulson?

>
> > I'd expect
> >
> fully loaded M9000 (64-socket SPARC64 VII+) to be approximately twice faster
>
> > than fully loaded Superdome2 (32-socket Tukwila) in majority of
> commercial
> > applications.
>
> > Do you have a hard data that could
> contradict my
> > expectations?
>
> I think the relevant comparison point is
> Poulson, as it should be out any day now.
>
> I'm a little surprised that they
> only have 32S systems, since they used to scale up to 64S...and now they have
> better interconnects.

That's the same as Fujitsu. Back in dual-core days they used to scale up to 128S, but now the biggest M9000 is 64S.

>
> But I don't perceive Itanium as being dramatically
> slower than Fujitsu.
>
> DK

Well, perception is one thing and the facts is something else.
We certainly don't have enough facts to know whether top HP gear is "dramatically slower" that than top Fujitsu M-series or just a little slower. But, IMO, we have enough info to be sure that Kira's original claim (M-series is far slower than Integrity) is false.


Anyway, the comparison between supporting Itanium and supporting M-series was invalid regardless of relative performance, for more than one reason:
1. Oracle resells M-series. So, it's partly their own.
2. Incremental effort required to support M-series on top of T-series (the same OS, the same ISA, mostly the same toolchain) is far lower than required to support HP-UX/Itanium on top of ... well ... nothing.