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We have some Sun Blade T6320s Servers that run on Sparc 64-bit UltraSparc T2 processors. We recently found out that the 2nd generation of these servers have a faster processor speed (1415 MHz) than the 1st gen ones (1165 MHz). The faster machines actually caused us some headaches when we could not reproduce a performance problem noticed in operations. Is there any way to "underclock" these Gen2 servers to 1165 MHz so that all of our development and test machines match what we have in operations?

codenaugh
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    Changing your clock speed will only change your clock speed. It won't necessarily make performance match, as these are two different CPUs with different / newer internal devices. – Spooler Oct 19 '16 at 00:18
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    This reminds me of the Turbo button for games that played too fast on newer 486 hardware. – hookenz Oct 19 '16 at 00:26

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I'm not sure what CPU you have

If you're using an UltraSparc T2 CPU it appears there is no frequency scaling. Perhaps you could introduce some carefully adjusted controlled load until they benchmark about the same (like, write some code)?

The CPU also has some power management features which may be helpful to adjust performance if you can find a way to use them:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensparc/02-t2-a-sscc2007-1530395.pdf

UltraSPARC T2 implements very limited execution speculation in order to minimize overall power consumption. To further reduce power, UltraSPARC T2 transitions a thread to a not-ready state whenever a thread encounters a long latency operation. Clock power is further reduced on UltraSPARC T2 by utilizing clock gating on datapath, control, and array structures. Power throttling is supported through 3 external power throttle pins. Based on the state of the power throttle pins, stall cycles are injected into the processor core pipeline to reduce overall dynamic power consumption. In order to reduce static or leakage power, logic gates with sufficient timing, noise, and slew margins are replaced with footprint-compatible gates with longer channel length [3]. UltraSPARC T2 includes on-chip thermal diodes which enable the system to regulate the die temperature by controlling the instruction issue rate, and by disabling threads

Ryan Babchishin
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  • I updated my question to include the exact CPU. Your assumption was correct. Both are UltraSparc T2 CPUs. – codenaugh Oct 20 '16 at 00:37