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Opteron Benchmarked Against Xeon
jbmnuke writes "Tom's Hardware has posted a review of AMD's Opteron v. Intels Xeon." Nothing gets the blood pumping like a whole new generation of CPUs to compare numbers to, right? Update: 04/22 12:35 GMT by H : And there's the official benchmarks as well, with more coming - like Linux Magazine and Newsforge
But the computer industry is driven mainly by a couple of things: businesses wanting to make money vs do what is right, and an ignorant public who thinks anything older than 3ys should be binned.
Windows XP needs 256mb to run right. That is nuts. I swear Windows in 10years time will need gigabytes to even boot up, and people will be genuinely shocked to think that you could check your email or load up www.slashdot.org on a system with less than 4gb of ram. Hello World will probably have a 2mb exe file and consume 10mb of ram. Oh, and your CPUs will use more watts of power than an entire household of lightbulbs, much to the joy of the nuclear industry and cartoon characters who want to see the world's environment destroyed and the toxic rubbish of binned computers pile up so high that they blot out the sun. And you'll have pointless photorealstic FPS games which all the obnoxious teensomethings will fret over, of course they never really help anyone in the greater scheme of things.
The computer industry is a fasical waste of resources. CPUs shouldn't use more than 1watt of power, we should only need to upgrade hardware every 15 years (without hardware failures), an OS should never use more than 6mb of ram and should fit in a ROM module so we don't need hard drives, we shouldn't have to put up with parts dropping like flies because the quality is so bad, software should run fast and be good to use instead of consistantly buggy and like trying to decyper 2000bit encryption. So am I enthused about some new ultramhz CPU, no. It will just equal more wasted money, more wasted time, more wasted resources, more teenagers wasting their lives, more programmers doing nothing but program, more unneeded power stations, more "dude buy a Dell" which we don't really need, more junk software from Microsoft that'll cost more every year, etc. All the while we could have been happily using a DX50 with 16mb of ram, which would not burn electricity like a telsa coil, not breakdown every 8 months - if only we got out of this delusional upgrade fetish, and bothered to make operating systems and software as efficient as they should be, meaning they'd be usable on something as fast as a 386DX40.
Well, computers are just a human creation and as dysfunction as the people who make and buy them. Programmers with no sense and no people skills, CEOs with the ethics of psychopaths, a public who spends money like water and can't bare to be without the latest toys to show off, obnoxious teenagers who want the latest Violence Game to chest thump to. You get the point.
And while I'm at it, I'll say how do you define a "great" CPU? If you're only thinking of speed and technology revolving around that, then the AMD64 and Xeon are both great. If you're thinking of wastage/usage of natural resources, electricity consumption, recyclability, and the ethics and motivations of the companies which make them - an economic/social holistic point of view - then they're bog awful, just like just about everything else in computing, many uncaring readers of Slashdot sadly inclusive.