Sun's spectacular benchmarks for its first 1GHz chip may be just too stellar. The 1050 MHz UltraSPARC III was officially announced this week, and along with it the SPEC benchmarks.
One of these, a floating point neural network simulation benchmark (art.179) is truly remarkable, as the graph here illustrates.
As the regulars point out at comp.arch this is five times faster than the fastest Alpha chip, more than three times faster than the 900Mhz UltraSPARC predecessor, and 20 times faster than the speediest Athlon or P4.
There's some speculation about whether this is due to an extraordinary compiler optimisation, or whether Sun has achieved the CPU equivalent of cold fusion.
And the answer? Well it should go in this space here. Unfortunately, the good people at Sun are like the rest of United States, tucking into a Thanksgiving Turkey. After which they can tuck into this turkey of a benchmark.
News source: The Register - Sun 'defies gravity' with USIII benchmark
