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In order to be able to (crudely) estimate the emulator performance, we use the term Effective Emulated CPU Frequency (EECF). This gives us a rough idea of how well the emulator will perform on modern Intel and AMD processors running at a particular frequency (Host CPU Frequency - HCF). The EECF lies somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the HCF. Alternatively represented:
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For example, if the HCF is 3.0 GHz, the EECF will lie between 750 MHz and 1.0 GHz. This means that the estimated performance of the emulator will be comparable to running the workload on an UltraSPARC CPU with a frequency between 750 and 1000 MHz. The actual performance depends heavily on the workload. If the workload uses many SPARC instructions that require more work to translate, the EECF will be lower.
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On modern Intel and AMD processors, the emulator performance scales more or less proportionally to the host processor frequency. Thus, a host processor running at 3.5 GHz will ~15% better performance compared to a host processor running at 3.0 GHz. As the frequency of the host processor drops we see a non-linear deterioration of emulator performance and very low frequencies may lead to inability to run the guest OS. We strongly reccommend not going below 2.0 Ghz.
The emulator performs best on the most recent Intel and AMD processors.
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3.4 Sizing the Emulator For Your Workload
We can provide tools for capturing performance metrics on your physical SPARC system which we can then analyze. At this point it should be clear to the reader that an emulator cannot match the performance of certain modern SPARC and PA-Risc platforms. However, we often encounter workloads running on such modern platforms that do not take full advantage of the available performance. In many cases we can successfully migrate such workloads to the emulator. In order to assess the feasibility of emulation, we have developed tools for capturing and analyzing performance metrics on the original SPARC and PA-Risc systems. After we have processed such performance data in most cases we are able to say if emulation can provide the required performance.
Please get in touch with Stromasys for help collecting performance data on your SPARC workload and sizing the emulator configuration.
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