Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 22, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Rendering Benchmarks
Although one would probably not purchase a $20,000 server for the explicit task of rendering, we thought to include our standard Mental Ray and Shake benchmarks in this review to demonstrate the scalability of all four processors in the system. Similarly, we have looked at how these benchmarks perform on other systems in the past, so we can get a real clear view of the power of our V40z in relation to those systems.Mental Ray 3.3.3
Just to give a bit of PC trivia, MentalRay was actually first developed on Sun machines during its early stages, and it's interesting to see that we have come full circle to testing Mental Ray on an x86_64 machine designed by Sun. We are running the 32-bit binaries provided by Alias Wavefront. You may be interested to see how some single CPU setups perform on the same test render here. Once again, we are running the same Maya benchmark file found in our other reviews. We ran Mental Ray via Maya using the command below:# maya_render_with_mr -file Benchmark_Mental.mb
Shake 3.5c
Apple develops a great digital effects package called Shake. We took the opportunity to run a newer benchmark script by Lindsay Adams, which you can download here. The benchmark script renders 10 frames under various effects using one or multiple CPUs. We sum the render times and display them below. The times recorded are the averages of three runs.The command run for this benchmark is:
# shake -exec hardware_test_v01.shk -vv
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RyanVM - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Did anybody else find it confusing that the reviewed system had CG-stepping Opteron 850s and Kris brought up E4-stepping Opteron 852s on multiple occasions? What CPUs were actually in the system?SUOrangeman - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Last page, .."Sun has a speed **daemon** on their hands, ..."
Freudian slip, hehe? Nice read nonetheless.
-SUO
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
MrEMan: Mediaplex is just an advertising server. Some advertisers (like NewEgg) host their banners on Mediaplex so they don't destroy their bandwidth. Sometimes when an ad campaign is hitting too many impressions the Mediaplex tag will revert to a 2x2 or a 1x1 pixel so that they don't harm their click through rates. It has nothing to do with spyware or malware or adware.Kristopher
MrEMan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Anandtech,What is with the 1/16" x 1/16" graphic (1280x1024 resolution on a 19" CRT monitor) for adfarm.mediaplex.com ?
Is it there with your permission or did someone hack your site?
If it is there with your permission, I must say I am surprised that you would put such stealth adware garbage links on your site.
jcourtney - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I'd love to see some benchmarks with Solaris instead of or vs. Linux for reference too. Nice read though as usual.ElFenix - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
"particularly considering the fact that the V40z does not utilize any active cooling directly on their CPU heat sinks"whoa, proper spelling of heat sink!
now i'm going to harp on the fact that blowing air across a radiator with a fan is not active cooling. air conditioning is active cooling, turning on the ceiling fan is not.
=)
nice read
Hikari - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I wish I could see a comparison of this and that Quad Opteron HP server. I have the HP one budgeted for this year already... (we're also a Sun shop).I didn't see an option for 15k RPM drives though. I could put in like 5-146GB@15k RPM in the HP which was one reason I was leaning towards it.
lihoyin - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Looking forward for a comparsion with HP DL585 / DL 385, both are also Monsters!Sunner - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Googer, that's true, Sun basically just rebadges Newisys servers, the same is true of the V20Z, in fact IIRC you can actually find some Newisys marks left on the servers :)Anyway, Kris, any chance of a couple of benchmarks with a 2.6 based distro?
2.6 has, among other things, good NUMA support, something that would be nice to have when running a 4-way Opteron ;)
//Sunner
dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Another 250/850 typo on page 3: "Below, you can see one of the Opteron 250s is exposed from under the copper heat sink on the daughterboard."