Weaknesses
The T1 only offered a single Floating Point unit to be shared by the 8 cores, limiting usage in HPC environments. This weakness was mitigated with the follow-on UltraSPARC T2 processor, which included 8 floating point units, as well as other additional features.
The T1 was only available in uniprocessor systems, limiting vertical scalability in large enterprise environments. This weakness was mitigated with the follow-on "Victoria Falls", commercially known as the UltraSPARC T2 Plus, as well as the next generation SPARC T3 and SPARC T4. The UltraSPARC T2+, SPARC T3, and SPARC T4 all offer single, dual, and quad socket configurations.
The T1 had outstanding throughput with massive numbers of threads supported by the processor, but older applications burdened with single thread bottlenecks occasionally exhibited poor overall performance. Single threaded application weakness was mitigated with the follow-on SPARC T4 processor. The T4 core count was reduced to 8 (from 16 on the T3), the cores were made more complex, the clock rate was nearly doubled - all contributing to faster single thread performance (from between 300% to 500% increase over previous generations. Additional effort was made to add the "critical thread API", where the operating system would detect a bottleneck and would temporarily allocate the resources of an entire core, instead of a 1 of 8 threads, to the targeted application processes exhibiting single threaded CPU bound behavior. This allowed the T4 to uniquely mitigate single threaded bottlenecks, while not having to compromise in the overall architecture to achieve massive multi-threaded throughput.
Read more about this topic: Ultra SPARC T1
Famous quotes containing the word weaknesses:
“Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping-place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept dogma. Of all weaknesses he most disliked timed and half-hearted faith. He would rather have jumped at once to Strong’s pure denial, than yield an inch to the argument that a mystery was to be paltered with because it could not be explained.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Delicious essence! how refreshing art thou to nature! how strongly are all its powers and all its weaknesses on thy side! how sweetly dost thou mix with the blood, and help it through the most difficult and tortuous passages to the heart!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp its seat, and rule in its stead.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)