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Red Hat Releases x86_64 Technology Preview, GinGin
HTMLSpinnr writes "Red Hat announced today it's release of GinGin64, a "Technology Preview" (read: not beta) of Red Hat's AMD64 technology. You can grab a copy here or at one of Red Hat's various mirrors. Though the version number listed in the release notes is 8.0.95, inside sources say it's based on Red Hat 9 plus some updates."
I think previews are a good idea as a measn of guaging customer response before commiting to a full release schedule of functionality and dates. Let potential customers play with it for a while and get their feedback without everyone wondering when it will be released, are dates slipping, will features be dropped rtc ad nauseum. It gives people a chance to properly evaluate and provide meaningful feedback
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
How are you going to benchmark it?
The only meaningful benchmark IMO is processing_power/cost. A comparison based on clock speed would be pretty useless since architectures are different, and Itanium is so incredibly expensive. I'm pretty sure that even if x86_64 is slower it's much cheaper to get enough CPUs for your needs than to buy an Itanium.
I remember when the mmx processor came. It hade this all new instructions that would increase the preformance with over 400% or something :).. But there where no applications so all the mmx instructions did was increasing the cpu core -> making the cpu extra hot.
Today we atleast have some programs that utilize the mmx instructions. But how long did it take?
Now to the point. When they make a opteron dist "Windows 64 and Redhat for example" do they only make sure that all applications can run, like only patching the necesary or do they redisign the whole os optimizing it for speed?
No, I meant that the only meaningful way of comparing processors is provided power for the same amount of money. If I need a server can can handle X load, and I can either get a dual AMD machine for $3000, or a single CPU Itanium for $6800, then the AMD one clearly wins, even if the CPU can do less work per second than the Itanium.
Now, I didn't research this much, but my point is that all that matters is the cost of doing X task with AMD processors vs Intel ones. Clock speed is irrelevant when comparing completely different architectures. And the comparison of the fastest AMD CPU with the fastest Intel one is also mostly useless.
The real question is: what Itanium sales?
Sure, Itanium sales are quite low right now. However, the whole idea of Itanium was to make a cheaper, faster, enterprise class server CPU that would kill SPARC, Alpha, PA-RISC and Power. It killed both HP architectures with marketing muscle alone. ;-) However, Itanic has decidely not lived up to the hype and the future isn't much brighter, IMO. Power is looking pretty good by comparison lately.
I assume that AMD isn't just positioning the Opteron as an alternative to the Itanium, but also as a "power user" chip, aimed at a slightly more general audience (e.g. video editing, CAD, scientific applications).
AMD has positioned Opteron as a general purpose workstation and server CPU.
Opteron looks like it has best of breed performance, at a much lower system cost. I think there'll be quite a shift in the marketplace. AMD's recent alliance with IBM looks particularly promising. It looks like the main threats from Intel are monopolistic behavior and marketing. Intel technology isn't looking so hot...
We'll see how it goes... I can't wait to get my hands on a dual Opteron workstation. :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
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