T2000 faster than I need

I never thought I'd see the day, but I seem to have found a computer that is faster than anything I need at the moment.

The T2000 is quick, especially for a lot of the tasks that I would be considering. Web serving, large compiles and other processes are all areas where I could see a use, but, even with the current range of websites and projects in hand, I don't think I'd ever get to use the power of this machine and that would be a waste, not necessarily of money - it'll probably go the same way as much of my other Sun hardware; still going ten years from now - but it would also be a waste of opportunity. I really don't have enough to throw at this box to get the best out of it each day.

That isn't, of course, a bad recommendation. The machine *is* quick and I can think of many companies that could use all of the power provided in the box and still need more - which is why Sun are building larger multi-core units and why having a data centre full of these little beasts would go a long way to solving their computing needs.

Behind the scenes though is the reality that for all the power that a T2000 provides, it is the power it doesn't suck up in terms of electricity that is more important to me. I've blogged many times on the requirement to lower power usage, not just for your electricity bill, but also for the environment and to lower the complexity of your IT infrastructure.

My T2000, even at peak load, consumes about the same electricity as a dual Xeon I've been using for a while, and, despite running at 1GHz instead of the 2GHz of the Xeons, the T2000 is noticeably faster - particularly when very busy (i.e. running multiple threads). Perhaps the term I should use here is 'more efficient'; the T2000 manages to handle 16 simultaneous threads, compared to the two threads of the Xeon, at more or less equivalent speed. An 8x speed boost for the same wattage of electricity should not be ignored. Imagine how much of a difference that could make to your electricity bill, your cooling requirements and the physical size of your data centre.

The only real problem is the floating point speed. With only a single FPU, the T2000 can be very slow, especially when compared to equivalent single CPU systems. For example, in one test, the T2000 was only slightly better than twice as fast as the Ultra3 Mobile Workstation I've had on test. Same architecture (SPARC), but with 16 threads trying to perform high levels of FP calculations, the benefit of multiple core simply disappear.

My final tests are going to be on database speed, a recommended target (particularly in web environments) for the T2000. Conveniently, I came across an optimized version of PostgreSQL that should help.

For now, I'm considering a T1000l; fewer cores and therefore less power, but perhaps more appropriate for my current needs.