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Intel Pushes Pentium 4 Past 3 GHz
denisbergeron writes "Yahoo has the news about the new P4 who will run at nothing less than 3.06 GHz. But the great avance will be the hyperthreading technology (already present in Xeon) that allows multiple software threads to run more efficiently on a single processor."
Yahoo has the news about the new P4 who will run at nothing less than 3.06mhz.
umm... I've got an XT clone that's faster than that... wanna buy it for about $600?
(/sarcasm)
I just hope hyperthreading is the real deal, not a load of hyperhype.
sig.
...but the C64 still got better sound.
Yeah, but what's its top speed?
It's interesting to see what the cutting edge is capable of, but you pay such a stupidly massive premium for the latest processor that only fools would use their own money to buy it.
In the UK you usually have the ultimate latest Intel at about 700 UKP- the sweet spot in the price/performance trade-off tends to be around the 200 UKP mark, which will probably be the 2.5Ghz by the time this 3Ghz one is out.
graspee
And yet while running enterprise class systems I can't find a system with too little power.
:)
Well I have a citrix farm full of quad Xeons and 4 gigabytes of RAM, and we'd still love some more power, thanks.
Maybe you don't want 3.06 GHz for what you're working on, but our "Enterprise Class Systems" (Win2k application servers) can use all the CPU we can throw at them. Everyone has different needs, and for a lot of folks, faster processors are a good thing.
(I've seen this troll a few times over the last four or five AMD/Intel product announcements. And it's still getting modded up.)
"You won't see a heck of a lot of difference in Word, but software like [Adobe Systems'] Photoshop or video-rendering software will benefit considerably," he said.
How can Word appear any faster at 3GHz? I would think that after 1.5GHz, improvement in performance would be hard to notice. Granted, it will be good for people who are still running those 200MHz clunkers but what's the incentive if you're already running in the GHz range?
Disregarding all of the comments on the 3.06 typo. Geez, I remember the day when we use to comment on processors, peripherals, parts. Now the community is stuck on whining about typos. Read it, chuckle to self,move on.
Anyway they have ramped up the speed, and added something that could have always been, hyperthreading. Xeon has always had it. This is not progress, this is almost not worthy reporting.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Or you can build a dual processor Athlon system for less money. No need for HypedThreading.
It has been reported on various sites that Athlon XP 2400+ chips (2GHz, new Thoroughbred Revision B core) are trivial to mod for dual CPU operation and easily overclock to 2.25GHz (150MHz FSB, aka 300MHz DDR, which is the most my ASUS A7M266-D will allow) with proper cooling (Thermalright SLK800 being my favorite). The chips are under $200 apiece. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those...
Proper Athlon MP 2400+'s are due shortly I'd assume.
I'll be able to run Word really fast now.
Humm, this raises a point for me. Of course they claim it is faster, but when exactly ?
...
I mean, is it faster when doing stack swaps or when using TSS to multitask? *BSD uses the TSS to multitask, taking benefit of the i386's way to quickly swap registers and stack. Windows doesn't do this
So, from a pure technical point of view, how does it work? Did they just make TSS switches faster? Some OS-es benefit highly from that, but others, well, don't.
Unreal Tournament 2003 just kicked my 1.0 GHz machine in the nuts and then made fun of me. If for no other reason, I'm glad to see this announcement, because I can expect a price drop on the 2.6 GHz and 2.8 GHz chips.
I have a 56k modem and the internet is soooo slow, will this make it faster? They said with the PIII it would but I didn't see much different.
I was torn between building another dual-CPU box (currently on twin 533Mhz Celerons with an ABit BP6 board), or going the small form-factor route. Now I can do both.
More at Shuttle's site.
Cheers,
Ian
Knock Knock!
...
...
Who's there?
15 second wait...
Intel
Yahoo has the news about the new P4 who will run at nothing less than 3.06mhz.
Does it at least have a turbo switch?
This will make things interesting for software licenses that charge per cpu.
for those of you who don't know, with hyperthreading, the system will appear to have two cpus. If you have a dual system with hyperthreading, then it will look like 4, and so on.
Does this mean that AMD's scale for measuring the performace of its CPUs (the Athlon 2200+ runs at 2200 zlotniks) will no longer compare fairly against MHz for the P4? Perhaps a P4 will run about as fast as an Athlon of the same clock speed (if you could get Athlons clocked at 3GHz).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
the huge number of story errors that keep popping up. You'd think that the story editors would try to mantain some kind of quality control.
However, it's also possibly a ploy to keep people posting indigant comments about errors. 50% of posts on these kinds of stories seem to be pointing out these glaring errors. Like the recent story about PS2 games on an Xbox which was nothing to do with the Xbox at all.
Come on guys, wise up!
Hyperthreading is a complex proof of the limitations of todays CPU architectures. I belive in a CPU architecture containing many small CPU cores on one chip, instead of just multiplying the issue and commit parts and sharing the execution units.
It would be more scaleable and easier to implement to use several complete CPUs. The biggest drawback (compared to hyperthreading) would of course be that in special situations some CPU cores would be idle, but this simply corresponds to pipe-line bubbles in the hyperthreaded case. This is easily compensated by two facts: 1) multiple CPUs can be made very scalable and 2) most computer systems today always runs multiple threads (i.e. utilization will be good).
Of course, for Intel to maintain their market lead, everything has to be compatible, so they'll have to pay, time after time, for the errors they made in the eighties (the 286 paging + the CISC ISA). By breaking Amdahl's law time after time (SSE, MMX, etc.) they have made an even more complex beast. The only area where they really excel is in the production processing. They can squeeze out high frequencies and pack the transistors tight. For that, I'll give 'em cred. For their CPU ISAs, I'll just laugh...
> FOR 1975!!!
Jump back in time... even further
Mhz = mega herz
mhz = milli herz
Imagine a computer that's triggered every 11 minutes... with hyperthreading!
Wow. It might have stunned Charles Babbage...
Great, so now we'll see nerds nitrogen-cooling these things to get an extra performance boost as well? What a waste of time.
This is all pointless. The entire pentium "architecture" (more like a shanty-town) needs to be dumped entirely. We NEED a clean start.
Even moreso, why is no one addressing the fundamental problem--that the PC is just horribly designed? There are better ways of doing things than just ramming everything through a single CPU. This is 2002--why are we not pursuing better computer design? The "PC" is the bottleneck for crying out loud. 10 years from now will we be reading about the new 10 Ghz PVII chip, still running in 30-year-old hardware? Wonder if I can still get a "Missing Basic ROM" error on my desktop machine...
Be, Inc. tried to redesign the "PC"...they had a very nice design, but they killed it before it's time. And how about Amiga...yeah everyone is sick of hearing about the Amiga but it WAS intelligently designed. Instead of shoving everything through the CPU the Amiga used coprocessors to deal with much of the stuff that bottlenecks PCs, leaving the CPU free for more important stuff. It was a great idea, and it actually WORKED.
I don't care who does it--I want to see a better machine being built. If done right, the Ghz of the CPU won't matter nearly as much.
Apparently you've never run tried to run IBM Websphere ;-)
This will totally change my life! It's the announcement that I'd been waiting for! I must rush out and purchase ten thousand of these immediately, if not sooner! And so on!
</sarcasm>, wouldn't it be simpler for Slashdot to just link to every product announcement from a major hardware manufacturer rather than go through the farce of picking one of the dozens of frenzied (and typo'd) submissions from the "f1rz7 5Ubm1z10n, 5uX0rz!" brigade?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm personally going to build an octathreading CPU by tricking the OS into thinking it's working with EIGHT processors! Wow, that should give me 8x the performance! Stupid Intel restricting themselves to faking just two processors.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
3.06milliHz ! Wow ! That means about ten clocks an hour ! With the super deep P4 pipeline (20 deep IIRC), it means it will push some 200 "single clock instruction" in just an hour. But beware of pipeline stalls. They better have a solid branch prediction algorithm.
Slashdotters did this a while ago :-)
Yahoo has the news about the new P4 who will run at nothing less than 3.06mhz
There's only one explanation to 2 typographical errors in the post.. sex..
Rob posting articles to be posted automatically, Kathleen wants Rob.. if you know what I mean.. Rob tries to rush.. well.. you get the idea..
Securing the physical pathways that transpoty data on a computer's motherboard. This will sure help me against those tiny little hackers inside my computer stealing my data!
Oh wait, you mean this is to protect the data against me? Looks like we have about a year before this is built into the PC architecture. Plan your computer buying wisely.
Bastards.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Maybe you don't want 3.06 GHz for what you're working on, but our "Enterprise Class Systems" (Win2k application servers) can use all the CPU we can throw at them. Everyone has different needs, and for a lot of folks, faster processors are a good thing.
Are they actually CPU bound, or are they slowed by memory access and bus bandwidth? Apart from certain numerical computations, I have rarely seen cases in which the CPU is really fully occupied, altho' the tools often report that it is. For example, tools will report if the CPU is idle waiting for a page fault to the swapfile, but not if it's waiting for data to get to or from main memory, it just looks like the CPU is occupied.
Knowing what I know of Citrix, it alone is far bigger than the L2, and that's before even considering the user applications. It requires the CPU to switch context heavily, and constantly flush and reload its L1/2/3 caches. After all, if you need 4G of RAM to run the applications you are using, and you have say an 8M cache, the CPU is going to be spending a lot of time managing its cache rather than doing useful work. Given that, it is bound by memory access, not raw CPU.
Manufacturers, driving by consumer marketing which believes that higher Mhz == better product, are optimizing in the wrong areas. If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.
It changed the CPU clock frequency - generally you left the switch on since that was the faster mode of operation. If you had an application/game/whatever that didn't handle the higher clock rate nicely (and a lot didn't) then you clicked the switch and the CPU core dropped from 10 MHz down to around 5.
They eventually became disused because instead of dropping down to 4.77 MHz (the orginal XT speed) they'd just drop some fraction of the regular CPU speed - down to maybe 7 or 8 MHz, which was way too fast still. Plus applications stopped doing stupid things like presuming the CPU frequency and using it for timing loops.
...Dual-CPU Athlon motherboards are not that easy to find in a retail store--you often have to purchase them mail order. :-(
Also, what end-user oriented software will take advantage of Intel's hyperthreading process right now? Will we have to wait for updates to CAD/CAM, drawing and image editing programs to use hyperthreading? And when will we see updates to multimedia programs such as Windows Media Player, RealOne, Quicktime, software DVD players, etc. that will take full advantage of hyperthreading? We might not see them until early 2003.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
The advantage of Linux (and to a lesser extent W2K) and the low end Solaris, AIX servers is that for the first time it was sensible to scale horizontally, so rather than have 1 box that did everything ala a Mainframe you'd have 10 that shared the work, then you'd add 5 more. And because the real bottlenecks now are disk and other IO issues you start using things like EMC, Cached RAID disks and lots of other very expensive storage.
But if you are scaling an application horizontally the last thing these days is the processor speed, sure the heavy duty maths is still sitting on a mainframe, your ERP is still on an AS400, but that is more about reliability than power. Intel boxes fail, period, so having one box isn't a smart move, have 10 is a more sensible approach.
Dual NIC, external disk via fibre channel. That is where I'll spend the cash. The processor just needs to be fast enough, and I'd like there to be at least two in the box. 2 Boxes doing everything, federated systems.
If you lob everything on one box, then yes you need all the processor speed you can handle, you also need to think about what happens when the box fails.
If Intel announced that this new processor could degrade its performance when issues arose then I'd be interested. Overheating ? Turn off hyperthreading and drop the clock speed. Still got issues, move down to minimum speed and start a shutdown process.
I like servers that will run for 5-10 years with no down time. But with Intel/AMD boxen I'll stick with lobbing in lots on the basis that they'll fail.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The fact is that for work a 700MHz PIII is usually fast enough given the rest of the system, as well as being reasonably cool and quiet.
So what is the point of this advert? Is it the result of a kind of desperation on the part of Intel? Marketing departments insisting on announcing ever smaller "feature creeps" in an effort to create a buying climate run the risk of the very buyer turnoff they want to avoid. It's like the old Indian auto industry, where the big new feature for each year was something like a differently shaped tail-light molding.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
But it's true.. it really hertz to edit these CPU stories.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
AMD doesn't have the equivalent of a 3GHz SMT CPU.
What did Intel sacrifice to make the number of Ghz higher for the sake of marketing? Really, I'd like to know, because I've heard this is the case with previous Ghz barrier crossings, and I wonder how it affects the overall performance of the CPU, and the rest of the computer for that matter.
Why not spend more R&D money in increasing the speed of the bus? It would give us way better performance.
Fooey. It has to do with *everything*. Yeah, your graphics card is sooper-fast. But what has to feed that card data? Your CPU. Your memory bus. Your AGP bus. UT2003 happens to be CPU-limited even with the latest-and-greatest video cards, all the way up to the fastest Athlon chips available.
Take a look at this UT2003 benchmark chart:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1650&p =3
You can see that the GeForce 4 Ti cards are ALL still getting faster the faster the CPU gets, right up to the bitter end.
That's not to say that a couple of years from now that 3D cards won't handle physics and AI onboard-- but they don't exist now, so it's hardly fair to say "A better gfx card will almost always be a bigger win than a faster CPU."
It depends on the game, and the newer they are, the more CPU they'll eat. (See Battlefield 1942)
The high performance of CPUs makes me wonder why we couldn't do a more interesting type of a machine.
I'd have a case with a crosbar type bus. In this you'd add CPU cards that had memory and a single daughtercard slot. The daughtercards would be to add custom interface electronics for specialized tasks, but not actual processors, so a CPU card could be a video card, a SCSI card, NIC, etc.
One CPU card would be the "master" CPU card which ran the core of the OS kernel plus applications. The other cards would run applications or kernel modules specifc to their hardware daughtercards; network stacks, filesystems, display components (renderers, GUI).
Increase performance? Add a CPU module. The kernel or user tools could manage which cards ran which applications -- some apps could be dedicated to a specific CPU card, other apps could be "floated" to CPU cards based on available cycles.
I don't think this is such a terribly new idea -- its kind of the modularity that IBM 390 or other NUMA architectures do now, but condensed into a single box. Think of a blade server box, but with a switching bus and the ability to access other systems memory.
It would require an OS with a lot more modularity. I'm not sure what would happen to apps that wanted RAM beyond a single CPU card's RAM capabilities, or how fast or easy you could move an app and its memory space from one card to another. I'm also not entirely sure that even a P3 @ 3.xx GHz would be able to do the work of an NVidia GeForce, even if thats all it had to do, either.
But it would be an interesting way to make a highly scalable platform, and scalable both ways -- big and small. An OS written for such hardware could run on a single-card system (think of a laptop or even a palmtop as a single-card system), and multi-card systems could come in S, M, L, and XL sizes depending on cost and need, as well as eliminating the CPU/Memory/Bus bottlenecks.
I know that there are some of you on here that will flame me saying that you DO use that power. And that's fine, you are the 1% of the population I mentioned earlier. But to do it (like most of you would... admit it) just to get another 4fps in UT2003 or whatever, it's just sick. Yes, eventually I will buy a new computer, but only when my needs exceed the resources in my computer, which hasn't happend just yet (it's getting close though...). If any of you can actually tell the difference between this 3.06GHz P4 and the 2.5GHz P4 (without using a stopwatch that measures in the milliseconds) I have a bridge to sell you. Don't let Intel make you think that you need to buy a new computer right now. It may help the economy in the short term, but you will just be wasting precious electricity (in this case gobs of it) just to say you have the latest and greatest. It's becoming a disease!
today is spelling optional day.
Kirk: "Scotty? Why did we just pass our destination?"
Scotty: "Captain, ah gat ta have more time! The system, she just can't handle this light of a load! She's loading Bonzi Buddy and Clipit applications because she's bored and needs someone to talk to!"
Spreadsheets were the killer app that caused the PC to take off, and Lotus 123 came with a super-annoying floppy-based copy protection scheme. They intentionally misformatted the floppy, then the program verified that it was an original by doing low-level tricks with the floppy controller.
The most ridiculous and shortsighted part was that they used CPU-based timing loops to do the timing for their stupid floppy tricks. Of course, these were calibrated to the only CPU speed available at the time, 4.77MHz. As a consequence, if a PC was going to run Lotus 123, it needed to be able to slow down to the original 4.77MHz speed while it read the Lotus floppy. IIRC, Compaq had a nifty patent that automatically slowed the PC whenever the floppy controller was in use. Others had to make do with a manual switch.
The cost to society for this DRM fiasco, hundreds of millions of useless bezel switches, undoubtedly was far greater than any revenue that Lotus made by thwarting piracy. (In fact, their revenue from DRM might be negative, because they were eventually displaced by non copy-protected comptetiters.)
I recently purchased a laptop with a super duper 1.7Mhz Pentium 4 mobile processor. It's a nice box but it won't play GTA III worth a damn. Why? Well because the video hardware is crap. So I slapped together a cheap Athlon box, running at a lower clock speed but with a GeForce4 video card and all of a sudden I have high-res frame rates that leave my laptop in the dust. But both boxes have about the same performance for running Oracle.
If you think about it these chips are somewhat ridiculous. How many of them are going to be installed in motherboards that still have an IEEE 1284 parallel interface on them? How many of them will be installed in motherboards that still have PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports? How many of them will be installed on motherboards that have floppy controllers? You've got all of this insanely great hardware being strapped onto motherboards that are loaded down and dragged down with a bunch of legacy technology from the 1970s. I for one would be a little more excited if Intel were to dedicate itself to eliminating the cruft in the PC architecture. This would do a lot to improve performance and ease of use and would probably improve performance more than just slamming in a faster CPU every six months.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
You mis-read the article - they dont say that ONLY XP and Linux support it only that XP definately supports is and Linux probably does.
:o)
Any operating system that supports SMP should work fine with this.
NT And 2K both support Hyperthreading for the simple fact that Intel designed it to look exactly like 2 processors per chip. I have a hyper threading dual processor box here running SQL server. It has 2 physical processors but Windows 2000 and even the Bios see them a 4!
M@t
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Sorry, but your post reeks of "armchair CPU designer" : It's all so clear and so obvious. I mean, it's not like Intel and AMD have a lot of extremely clever people who seek the best balance between all of the systems...is it?
Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine.
Intel and AMD will spend their money on whatever generates the most ROI. They have collectively spent literally billions of dollars convincing Joe Public that CPU Mhz is the best way to measure the speed of a system - they aren't going to throw that away. A competent manager with R&D dollars to spend will therefore spend them on increasing Mhz.
Oh, and your post reeks of being underexposed to any architecture other than x86.
though the cost/benefit is out of whack. A P2 2.4Ghz with 2MB of L2 would get trounced by a 2.6Mhz with 512MB of L2 cache, disputing your claims that CPU speed doesn't matter. Large cache chips only make sense if you can't get a faster CPU:
Yes, assuming the code to run is 512k in size. If the code is ~2M, so it fits into L2 on the slower processor, then it will have the advantage, because the faster one will have to waste cycles moving the cache back and forth to main memory. Cache size is related to CPU speed only in terms of memory bandwidth: if your CPU cannot get data from main memory fast enough to keep it occupied, then you need faster memory closer to the CPU, which is what a cache is. If you are context switching, then you will have to keep dumping the cache and reloading it, which puts larger caches at a disadvantage.
Ultimately, caches are a hack; an elastoplast solution to the fundamental problem, which is the mismatch between the rate at which a modern CPU can process data, and the rate at which memory can supply it. In an ideal system, there would be no CPU caches at all, because the CPU could get data from main memory fast enough to keep it fully occupied. Systems used to be built like this, before the current obsession with clock speeds.
"Yahoo has the news about the new P4 who will run at nothing less than 3.06mhz."
It's just the latest in a long-running battle between AMD and Intel. Judging by the speed on this thing, and assuming it might actually be able to run at say... 3GHz, we're looking at a chip that can run 1,052,688,062,745 (over a trillion) times it's rated clock speed with no additional cooling!
I may be an AMD fan, but holy shit, Intel. Bravo!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I can surf the web faster or no?"
(someone actually asked me this in talking about the 2.2p4)
--Joey
" overclocking is pointless cos the speed increase you get isn't worth the effort and money."
Yes, because entering my BIOS at POST and upping the FSB by about 10MHz is so incredibly time-consuming and costly.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine.
The bus and memory bandwidth has improved pretty much in lockstep with the CPU computational ability. While it might be nice on paper to have 16GB of memory bandwidth, and it might look good on a ridiculously synthetic memory bandwidth benchmark, in practicality such a imbalance would be just a monstrous waste of money: Generally processors actually do something with the data that they're processing, so the two factors have to balance: You need a system design that can keep the processor satiated. In the Athlon world such a situation was demonstrated superbly recently with the ramping up of the memory subsystem speed, DDR ramping up from 266Mhz to 400Mhz...what improvement did it demonstrate? Virtually none. The processor simply had no real need for the additional memory bandwidth, though I'm sure it will as they come out with the next generation.
Intel and AMD will spend their money on whatever generates the most ROI. They have collectively spent literally billions of dollars convincing Joe Public that CPU Mhz is the best way to measure the speed of a system - they aren't going to throw that away. A competent manager with R&D dollars to spend will therefore spend them on increasing Mhz.
While I have spent considerable effort in the past disputing the Mhz-is-king myth (especially in regards to the P4 versus the Athlon), I think you're promoting just as false of an claim. CPU speed DOES matter. By your claims, shouldn't these benchmarks show no improvement as the CPU power ramps up, given your claims that it's starved for throughput?
http://www.monroeworld.com/pchelp/xptweaks.php
:)
I've done most of these tweaks on a group of brand new 1.2Ghz machines, and I'd say it easily makes XP perform twice as fast.
And an added bonus, you no longer have AOLdows on your desktop
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Ultimately, caches are a hack
Absolutely not. Making large memories matching the speed of the CPU is not feasible. If you want the speed of the memory to match the CPU speed, it has to be smaller. Since most modern systems uses paging/swapping, a smaller memory will cause more trashing on the disk and result in a slower system.
Instead of having to make one choice between speed and size, we have multiple levels of caches with different choices of speed and size. This actually gives a performance improvement. The remaining problem obviously is, that not all software was written with this in mind. Software actually written with the speed difference between L1 cache and swap file in mind can be 100 000 times faster than software not keeping this in mind.
However designing an algorithm for the number of different levels in a modern system is not feasible. There would be far too many parameters, and you couldn't optimize your algorithm for all of them. Instead what is needed in the future is cache oblivious algorithms, that will be efficient on one level without knowing the actual size of the cache and cachelines. The advantage is that since the efficiency is independend of the sizes, it will be efficient on all the levels at the same time. As data grows such an algorithm will become faster than any other algorithm.
The next step as cache oblivious algorithms are becoming more common is to design architectures with cache levels optimized for cache oblivious algorithms.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
...our "Enterprise Class Systems" (Win2k application servers) can use all the CPU we can throw at them. Everyone has different needs, and for a lot of folks, faster processors are a good thing.
right click on desktop --> "Properties" --> "Effects" --> uncheck "Use transition effects"
That should make your XPerience a bit snappier.
Seriously, I suppose it really depends on site needs, but I still see whole offices run their e-mail on SPARCstations (less than 200MHz CPUs) and websites on Ultra Enterprise 250s (bleeding edge in 1997). And...they perform just fine.
A single server with Quad Xeons really should be sufficient for a company with many thousands of employees. Well, with Windows, perhaps a few hundred. Regardless, that's a hell of a lot of data-processing capability.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
This is the int result...
Look at floating-point SMP throughput (the earlier post mentions things like engineering apps, etc.). That is where Sun systems shine. For integer stuff...well, if you are compiling a really large software application, that is important, but, otherwise, it isn't terribly relevant.
Sun systems are known for throughput, which is a better measure of work done. Quake FPS isn't terribly useful in the real world.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
"Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine."
Not exactly true. I work as an Opens Systems Programmer at a major research university. I have a P2-333 and an Sun Ultra 1 on my desk. Which do you think is less painful to use? I'll give you a hint, it doesn't have a 64 bit processor on it. I'll tell you, I'd rather use my P2-333 to serve a website than the Ultra 1. So those sparcs you speak of are rarely as fast as the newer PC's in most everyday tasks.
That being said, it sure is cool to say that you're running sparc linux, and in the winter I'd rather have the sparc on my desk to keep me warm.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Maybe your real problem is the power-suckage of Citrix?
I'm sorry, but after doing some Citrix administration for a couple years - I'm convinced that the product is a solution to a problem that never really existed.
1. Their "reduced cost of ownership" is a blatant lie. Not only is Citrix ungodly expensive for licensing, but instead of having 30 or 40 users running a Win desktop happily on systems most firms already owned, they have to invest in monster servers to handle the load of serving all 30 or 40 of those desktops out. (Either served to the same, existing hardware that used to run the Win desktops anyway, or to overpriced "thin clients" which tend to break down as often (or more often) than the PCs they replaced.)
2. The "ease of administration" is questionable, at best. EG. I don't know many Citrix admins who found sharing multiple printers in the environment was "smooth sailing". I also don't really see the supposed advantage behind the "change it once on your server, and everyone gets the update!" concept. You can accomplish the same with a number of remote deployment tools for workstations (Enterprise edition of Norton Ghost, for example?). You also don't have to hassle with getting everyone logged out of a Citrix box to restart it after you make changes requiring a reboot. (I find it easier to schedule individual workstations to reboot at night or over people's lunch hour.)
Look, we all agreed that the mainframe/dumb terminal model was "outmoded" after the 60's and 70's. We embraced the personal computer, and eventually the usefulness of "peer to peer networking". Now, Citrix comes along and drags all the modern things back into the 60's and 70's -- yet this time, we're supposed to think it's "innovative"?
But I believe the 700 UKP price tag is to make you believe 200 UKP is a reasonable price for a processor.
If they priced the latest and greatest "normally", your sweet spot would probably e somewhere else...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And yet while running enterprise class systems...
;)
I'm sick of running enterprise class systems. I never liked the damn LCARS system from the first time I used it.
I've had enough. I'm trading my Galaxy class for a Warbird!
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
I went ahead and got you a link to another page in the SAME ARTICLE I linked that shows a chart of CPU usage with Radeon cards:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1650&p =6
Note that other pages in the article include the Kyro II, Matrox Parhelia, and the older GeForce 2 and 3 lines, as well as the GeForce 4. Keep in mind that the faster the card gets, the faster the CPU must be to keep it fed with data. You may not see CPU saturation with a slow card, because the card is maxed long before 100% CPU usage. In the Radeon chart, you can see that the faster the Radeon, the more CPU constrained it is. Just like with Nvidia.
The Radeon 9700 isn't there because it didn't exist when the article is written. It will be even more CPU constrained than the GF4.
I suspect you are a troll, but I'd hate to see the issue confused any further.