[asterisk-biz] Using SUN T1000 or T2000

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, Nikolai Manek wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Using SUN T1000 or T2000 would not make sense for Asterisk. These are
> awesome machines for highly multithreaded applications like web servers or
> J2EE. But the CPU is sharing with it's cores only one floating point unit.
> If you are doing all your codec translations it would be pointless to have
> an 8 core system with one floating point unit. The performance might be
> worse than a regular AMD or Intel single core chip (no idea). What would be
Very incorrect, the modern hand-written codecs do not use FPU. And, T2000 
has 8 integer cores. Can't be *that* bad, if someone actually writes 
equivalent of IPP for T1 processor.

> interesting is the performance of running Asterisk on UltraSparc IV+. I
> bet that would be really fast especially since you can scale it almost
> linear. Beyond the bottom line you will get the best results at the best
> cost/performance with AMD boxes (from SUN if you will;-) like x2100) and
> scale horizontal (more boxes for more calls). And a hardware g729 board
> from Digium would solve all these problems completely. With a nice DSP
> hardware based solution you can probably handle hundreds of calls on one
> board without the PC CPU doing anything. Can't wait. Maybe Cisco is
> breaking out in sweat then...That's whats making their 5400 servers a
> good choice for SIP termination to put 700 calls in 2U. Two AMD servers
> are way cheaper and consume probably less power as well (almost the
> highest portion of our cost by the way).
The ghetto fabulous alternative (if you need lots of transcoding) is to
use MAX TNT as a SIP transcoder.  672 calls in 8U, roughly 4k$ (far
cheaper than loaded 5400).

-alex