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SGI launches R16000
nkrgovic writes " SGI has just launched a new CPU - the long expected R16000. The new CPU works on 700MHz, has 4MB secondary cache and more goodies.
For now the new CPU is only used in SGI's Fuel workstations, but we should expect to see it pretty soon in SGI's Origin servers as well. With new high density compute nodes this should make the Origin's the fastest supercomputing server per square foot."
Instead of everybody saying "GHz doesn't matter, dummy" why doesn't somebody quote some real benchmarks? I poked around on the web a bit and all the benchmarks I can find either (1) are out of date, or (2) show Alpha, Intel and AMD blowing everybody else out of the water.
In my experience SGI's are slow but are extremely scalable. With IA32-based machines you'd be lucky to get 4 CPU's sharing memory, unlike the 64+ you get from SGI. Very good for scientific codes but not so hot for applications that are either not parallelizable at all, or embarassingly parallelizable such as Seti@Home or ray-tracing a feature film.
I'm sorry to disapoint you.. but I have no problem agreing with you that the clock speed is not all... But its still important... On our CFD (Computation Flow Dynamics) the kind of thing that SGI super-computers are made to handle.. Our el-cheapo AMD Athlon based cluster kicks the ass of pretty much every SGI in the data-center where it is.. and I think it even kicks the ass of the NEC... So yes, I'm sorry but 3Ghz is more than 4 times 0.7ghz and it does heck a difference.. And if you look at operation per dollar, there is not even a comparison... And I wont tell you how much their OS sucks.. the latest Irix versions feels like linux for 8 years ago (I mean the userspace stuff, I dont know much about their kernel...)..