[geeks] New Itanium machines from SGI

[Mike Meredith]

On Tuesday 07 January 2003 11:41 pm, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> Well, if their NT boxes were beginning of the end, this is definitely
> the beginning of the end of the end.  I -loathe- the idea of IRIX
> going south in favor of Linux, almost as much as I loathe the idea of
> the elegant R14k CPUs being replaced by Itanium.

Me too. But it isn't going to happen anytime soon. SGI have already said 
that the Itanium runs far too hot for dense computing, so MIPS will 
stay around for a while on their high-end stuff. After all, the 
Altix3000 scales to "hundreds" of CPUs whilst the Origin3000 scales to 
"over a thousand" CPUs.

> Well, as much as they've been wanking about Itanium since it first
> came out, it's not surprising that they're saying that.  

I wouldn't be surprised if it is true ... MIPS is hardly a speed demon 
anymore.

> However, if
> they'd put all that effort into giving MIPS another shot in the arm,
> it'd be just another stinky Intel chip by comparison.

There's a roadmap of MIPS future deployment that shows it progressing 
steadily for the next several years.

> However, I won't believe that Linux's SMP scalability can touch IRIX
> or Solaris until I see it.  Linux over 64 CPUs?  That sounds painful,
> unless things have improved -immensely- in the last year or so.

I suspect it has improved considerably ... after all SGI have been 
working on the Linux scaleablility problem themselves and they aren't 
the only ones. The results of this work are quite possibily still not 
in the mainstream development kernel, but that doesn't mean it isn't 
obtainable. Not that I believe that Linux is as scaleable as 
Solaris/IRIX are, but I suspect it isn't painful any more.