[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Michael Schiller]

Chris Hedemark wrote:

> Mike, thank you for being the grown up here and actually debating the
> issue on meritorious points.  I have a lot more respect for your
> approach than for Mr. McGuire's (regardless of his standing within this
> mailing list).

I guess you just don't know me well enough yet. Imagine that, me being called grown
up!

> Sure, you're lucky to get 2 or 3 years out of the crap that is being
> pushed to the bottom end consumer in the PC market.  Even the big guys
> like Compaq, Dell, etc. are peddling cheap wares to the masses.  I got
> burned on something like that once (once) around 1994 buying an Acer
> box.  Every machine I've owned since then has been home rolled.

Home 'rolled' machines can be pretty nice. However I do believe we were discussing
using these machines in a corporate environment, and very few corps are going to allow
anything serious to be run on home rolled machines. If for no other reason than
support, if a part breaks in a home rolled machine, who do they yell at?

> Hmmm I had heard that Solaris 9 wouldn't run on anything earlier than a
> sun4u but haven't actually tried the betas yet.

Yes, Solaris 9 will work with sun4m machines.

> I would argue though that the 486 processor was not designed for a
> specific OS.

Perhaps the processor wasn't designed for a specific OS, but most of the machines they
were built into were. Yes, there are other OSes out there, both for the Intel CPUs, as
well as Sparc or PARISC, etc., but basically 99.9% of all 486's were put into windows
machines. Same for all the other x86 cpus. Sure, you can run Linux or even Solaris on
it, but it wasn't designed for it, it was designed to run Windows.

> Remember, x86 != Windows.

As I said above, it might as well be.

> I agree they have staying power.  They were very well designed boxes.
> More and more such systems though are being pushed off to handle network
> infrastructure duties (mail relay, DNS, dhcp, etc) while more
> challenging tasks are increasingly being moved to x86

I suppose when you say more challenging tasks are being moved to x86, you're referring
to either where you work, or how you would do it. I think you'll find that the 'big
boys' in the industry that still know how to do things right are sticking with their
Unix workstations. There used to be a saying years ago "Nobody ever got fired for
buying IBM" I think that can also be said about Sun, or other serious workstations
these days.

> I won't throw out anything newer than a Pentium 60 on the x86 side.  I
> would keep older stuff too except my house is getting full so I have to
> raise the bar a little.

Again, we're not discussing what you or I as computers literate folks would do, but
Corporate America. Big difference.

> I however have a preference for OpenBSD for most server tasks and Linux
> for most desktop tasks.

Once again, the BSD's are great operating systems, as is linux, however unless you buy
an x86 system from a vendor that sells the machine with linux preloaded, and get a
service contract for that setup I doubt you'll find all that much acceptance in
corporate america. The problem with buying a windows pc, and then installing linux or
xxBSD on it is that you now have either 2 vendors to deal with (assuming you got your
OS with some form of support), or just one vendor who can blame all your troubles on
the fact that you're not using their recommended OS on the machine. Corp America wants
things that dazzle, and like all the cute toys that come with windows, or the like
something more solid, such as from Sun, or HP's workstations.

> I don't do windows.

Personally I would prefer not to, and usually don't, however at the moment I'm running
Win98 on this PC because I was going to let my girlfriend use this machine before she
became my ex-girlfriend :(

-Mike


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