ClearNet Security

I'm no fan boy; in fact I seem to carry a good dose of skepticism around with me any more. I like science, I like numbers, I like facts, it's really really easy to talk and it's usually even easier to pull out some numbers and then you don't need to talk. So few people do it though, this whole industry is filled with sales people and talk a lot's. I'm a Sun shareholder but I'm also a former IBMer and I know the difference. I'm not a shill but I'm also not a hater, I won't just advertise for Sun or Dell like Tate, either. So I'm helping to kick around a Niagara, uncut, my opinions and observations. Maybe some Sun people will hear me and it'll put a fire under them because frankly, my first impressions aren't so great.

Test 1, openssl speed. I know this is not fair, the Niagara is "optimized for threads." It doesn't have a great deal of cache (relatively speaking) and it doesn't have a lot of the out of order stuff many modern processors have, but it's late, I haven't slept a lot the last few days and it's easy. All things being equal, I'd personally still expect decent results from the machine.

I had grandiose plans of testing on many of the machines I have around here but my old imac in my kitchen that primarily is a browsing and email machine did a good enough job so I stopped there for now and never got to any of the fast machines.

 

Machine 1: Sun Fire T2000, 8 cores and costs around $15,000.

Machine 2: iMac, G5 1.6Ghz, 1GB of RAM. "The Breakfast nook machine", costs about $1,000 give or take.

FYI, "/usr/sfw/bin/openssl speed" segfaults out of the box. I'm not sure what the rules on this machine or what all has been done to it; I assume that's how it came though. Maybe someone else can try it on their T2000. If you give it an argument to run a specific test it will work.

 

 

 

 

As you can see, my dinky old iMac blew this beast clean out of the water, across the board. Again, this isn't a terribly fair test but I was a little shocked and I didn't even get out the big mac or opteron machines. FWIW, Aqua is running and the T2000 is damn near idle, I might have a Norton AV scan going on too, I have 2 browsers up, OpenOffice, 3 terminals and iTunes all running also.

So some observations, first, gcc didn't work real well yet so I haven't rebuilt openssl on the T2000 to provide optimized numbers, I'd assume that Sun did an okay job of building it though while Apple clearly didn't (but I chalk up to Apple supporting many more processors at the time, G3s, G4s, and G5s all run that code out of the box)

Second, DES didn't optimize so well, it might be a GCC 4.0 regression because everything else got a nice and noticeable boost with the proper optimizations. The RSA stuff in particular was impressive.

So initially on non-threaded integer stuff, which isn't exactly what Sun claims the T2000 is good at (although they kind of act like it's a world beater at integer math) it looks like an old v9 ultrasparc multiplied by 8 which was kind of interesting back in the 20th century...

I'm sure that the T2000 will show some form as we beat it up with other things.

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