Boot Log Messages On A Pre-Production Processor

Check this Boot log. This is a log from the Power4 Processor which is in the pre-production stages, and since it's in the pre-production stages, they removed the BOGOMIPS value. Nevertheless - it looks very interesting. Keep up the good work, IBM!

Comments

Geek W4rZ

[uncleFester]

Welcome to the new bragging domain of the geek! No more $GENETAL-size wars of the past. I can see it now...

• Bootlog Battle ('d00d' my bootlog consumes its own 1Gb disk')
• Uptime Follies ('What do you mean it's impossible? This machine HAS been up for 23.723243 years!!!')
• Peripheral Cramming ('It was tough making PCI-slot splitter cables so I could cram those seven Geforce cards in there, but you should see the results!')
• Megahertz Madness ('I can melt the case on my overclocked Celeron in 2.5 seconds.. and that's MOLTEN baby!')

More to come, I'm sure...

Impressive...

[headLITE]

Well, unless for the SCSI stuff, the log sure looks impressive. But both Bogomips and a boot log can hardly show the real advantages. The Power4 is optimised for SMP and has a huge memory bandwidth (10 GB/s). Its also not one single monolithic CPU but consists of two, smaller CPUs. Two CPUs will outperform one single, large one when it comes to doing many tasks at once and the Power4 has the additional benefit that data can be exchanged between the two CPUs at a fairly high speed without leaving the processor core. The Power4s speciality is highly bandwith-intensive multithreaded applications, which will make it THE CPU for servers and the like.

Re:Wow

[Octorian]

First of all... Why the hell would you want to run Mac OS X on the thing? Actually, I have to say the same about Linux unless it's drastically improved in the next year.

This is a POWER processor, and it belongs in an IBM RS/6000 machine running AIX. If IBM markets like usual, there will be nothing flashy about it, and few will know of it, but it will kick the crap out of anything Sun can produce.

Also, if the clock speed is released, you must remember that it is really irrelevant for comparing POWER to x86. Why? Well, I've got these two machines sitting next to my desktop. One is a Pentium 100MHz running FreeBSD, and the other is a POWERstation 350 (41MHz POWER CPU) running AIX. A week ago, I ran a floating point benchmark, and the PS350 was faster than the P-100 (and that was with gcc, which sucks on AIX more than any other platform).

Also, AIX redefines the term "industrial strength". It's not really BSD-nix or SysV-nix, but kinda a random hack of the two, feeling more BSD, but it has really good system management tools, since it has plenty of non-standard commands for things like resizing filesystems and stuff (yes, on the fly, no rebooting).

Anyways, here's something I'm working on:

AIX Airlines
You arrive at what the map said was the airport, however
it looks a lot more like a massive industrial complex. You check
in at a counter staffed with men all wearing a black tie and white shirt
uniform. Then, you get on a tram that takes you to the terminal.
You quickly notice that AIX Airlines is flying both brand new aircraft,
and planes dating back to the 50's. When you arrive at your gate,
you notice that the aircraft is huge and painted blue. It only has
4 engines, however it is easily three times the size of a 747. You
notice workers using massive cranes loading up the aircraft with everything
from industrial equipment to parcel shipments.

You eventually board the aircraft and settle into
your seat. When looking up, you quickly notice that there is a 3-digit
numerical display where you would expect the fasten-seatbelt and no-smoking
lights. Special trucks push the aircraft away from the gate, and
help it taxi onto the runway. Then, several more vehicles and mechanics
arrive to strap on a pair of rocket boosters to the wings. You notice
that they have not yet started the engine, as the captain announces that
you have been cleared for takeoff. Then the rocket engines fire,
causing the aircraft to throttle up and take off from the runway.
At 1000 feet, the engines start up and the rockets drop away into the ocean.
The 3-digit display begins displaying seemingly random numbers,
however the stewardess is passing out the "AC/800 Aircraft Passenger
Service Manual" which describes them. Four hours later, the
captain announces that the aircraft has reached cruising altitude.
You see a guy named Smitty carrying a pile of forms from the cockpit, and
the plane suddenly throttles up to Mach 6.

AIX airlines only flies intercontinental, however
they have the lowest fares, since each flight carries 6,000 passengers,
and thousands of tons of cargo.

For those who are wondering

[/]

The BogoMIPS value is a measure of how many million times per second a processor can perform "do nothing" executions. It's measured at startup and used to tweak some timing loops in the kernel. From a marketing standpoint, however, there is absolutely nothing sexxy about publishing how good your cpu is at doing nothing.