[Cryptography] I'll give the right answers to the right questions

[Jerry Leichter]

> You could look at Sun/Oracle Niagara which was pretty much 8-way hyperthreading per core. Ultimately it didn't have good enough single-thread performance, regardless of how embarrassingly parallel your workloads.
I worked on intelligent network management software back in those days.  Solaris SPARC was our favorite platform.  (We supported many.)  But Niagra - well, they were then the T series processors I believe - were a disaster.  Customers kept asking us to run our code on them, as they were much cheaper than traditional high-end SPARC boxes - and if you just looked at the total specs the T series were way more powerful.  Our software had tons of threads - a basic server started up with 80 or more of them - but they were used for structuring, not for parallelism.  It was hard to get the effective parallelism above maybe 4.  So on a T series performance was disastrous.  (It didn't help that early T series boxes used FP units that were shared - something like on FP unit for every four processors.  We didn't do a huge amount of FP computation - but we did enough this bottleneck made already bad things much worse.)

                                                        -- Jerry