[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Dave McGuire]

On June 24, Chris Hedemark wrote:
> > Them's fightin' words.  Do you have any IDEA of the kind of hardware
> > that Dave deals with on a daily basis, in his HOUSE even?
> 
> I've seen photos, and it is quite impressive.

  Thanks man.  (no sarcasm intended)

> Still, while that hardware is mighty studly, the dollar for dollar
> argument still trumps the CISC vs. RISC argument in terms of overall
> system performance.  The kind of people footing the bill for that exotic
> hardware are increasingly turning to cheapo CISC clusters and laughing
> all the way to the bank.

  *bzzzt*  Moron alert.

  Exotic hardware?  No.  Sure, the Crays might be considered "exotic",
I'll give you that.  But most of the machines here are SPARCs.  The
SPARC architecture is a modern, scalable IEEE standard.  The x86
architecture is an old, non-scalable, proprietary architecture dating
back to the 8-bit era that's completely incompatible with everything
else.  Now...which is "exotic", again?

  Cheapo CISC clusters?  Oh really.  If you're talking about the Crays
and Beowulf clusters, yes, a Beowulf cluster can be damn impressive
from a price/performance standpoint (if your organization doesn't have
downtime penalties...most do) BUT only for things which parallelize
well.  Most Crays are vector machines.  A Beowulf cluster cannot do
that kind of work.  If you don't understand this, go read the first
4-5 chapters of "Parallel Computers" by Hockney and Jesshope, then the
first few chapters of "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach"
by Hennessy and Patterson.  Then read them again.  Then get back to me
if you think you still have an argument.

  And as always, have a nice day.

          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd