Jon Lindgren wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Rick Kelly wrote:
>
> I'd be curious to see what kind of performance you can eek out of it with
> only 256k of cache.  The one thing which has stopped me from going out and
> buying one of the Netra X1s or the Blade 100s is the small cache.  I can't
> convince myself that it's worth it.
> 
> Has anyone run one of these smaller ultrasparc IIs with the smaller cache,
> and has anyone been able to say "it's okay" or "it's a slug" [or,
> hopefully, "it's fast, but it'll be faster once NetBSD runs on it ;-]?
> 
> -
> Jon
>  --------------------------------------------------------------------
>  - The opinions expressed are not necesarily those of my employer.
>    "I wonder how many people actually read my .sig?"


Check out

http://www.sun.com/microelectronics/UltraSPARC-IIe/index.html

The 256k cache is on-chip L2 rather than off chip, like the Pentium
III.  You might see parts of the website specifications for Sun Blade
100 where its says the L2 cache is external but I think thats an error.

With 20 SPECInt95 and 21 SPECfp95 its still trounced by Intel offerings,
but Sun is reaching a much more reasonable price/performance point than
the U5/U10. Oh, and you can use standard ECC PC133 RAM with the Sun
Blade 100 (they reduced the memory width to 64 bits from 128 but upped
the memory mhz slightly).  Its PCI bus only (for graphics too).  Its a
10 watt chip, which should mean the Sun Blade 100 will have a
small/quiet power supply and probably no CPU fan.

You get a serial console too though, right? - thats got to be worth
something.

Nate


P.S. http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/summary/local/summary.pdf is a
decent source of the top SPEC92/95 scores for various chips, I imagine
pulled from spec.org - needs some updating though.


P.P.S. I have a dual supersparc SS10 in the SF bay area that I'd like to
donate for netbsd SMP development - if anyone is interested please send
me mail.