[rescue] Re: [geeks] THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK.

[Dave McGuire]

On June 13, dave at cca.org wrote:
> That wouldn't gain you anything. The performance difference between
> a workstation and a super these days is almost entirely due to the
> memory bandwidth & IO.

  *bzzzzt*  Thank you for playing.

  You've forgotten about the performance of the processor, and the
number of processors.  A Cray T932/32 can deliver a sustained 64GFLOPS
of big-testicle 64-bit floating-point power.  You point me to a
workstation that can do that, and I'll eat cat food in order to buy
one.

> What surprises me is that we haven't seen a standard RISC chip thrown
> in a box with a Cray-class memory system. (Well, I suppose that's what
> the J90 is, actually...)

  ...and, well, vector execution units.  And multiple processors.  And a
crossbar switch for memory access.  And multiple I/O processors.  And
the fact that the Cray PVP architecture isn't very RISC-like.

            -Dave McGuire