Slashdot Mirror
Latest Processors Tested Under Linux
An anonymous reader writes "I don't run into reviews featuring Linux much but here's a great review I found posted on Linux Hardware. It features the latest Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 and AMD Athlon 64 FX-60. Since both of these are dual-core processors, they also decided to throw in the best single-core CPUs for comparison. This is a great review for Linux folk. It gives a look at what hardware you may want to consider for your next workstation."
It seems to dominate in the 1 test that isn't designed around games or primitive single-threaded rendering or encoding applications. You know, real life programs geared towards professionals. They say that Intel is the loser, but it seems that AMD is the one who is scrambling from the pocket like Mark Rypien (so to speak).
Aren't we all fawning over the possibility of running Linux on a new iMac now?
Er, no/kinda/um...
I have a pretty anemic system at present (450MHz PIII), and have recently started to do some ray-tracing.
For ray tracing, the sort of balls-to-the-wall systems in this review are the sort of thing you want, but frankly the idea of ending up with yet another giant space-consuming ATX box that sounds like a jet-engine at takeoff is sort of depressing.
FWIW, I think the current imacs are pretty icky too [I don't like the whole integrated monitor/system style in the first place, and the current imacs are not all up to Apple's standards of elegance -- they're just sort of thick and clumsy looking].
What I'd really like is a system that's as small and as quiet as possible, e.g. the mac-mini, but with a beefed up (dual core?) processor/memory-system. Obviously the heat management would need to be upgraded too, so it couldn't be as small as a MM, but it seems like with appropriate technology (liquid cooling to giant heat sink on the rear?), it needn't be anywhere as bloated as the typical ATX box.
Are there are any happy mediums like this out there? Systems that are reasonably small and quiet, but still somewhat fast for doing computation-bound problems?
I'm glad to see this review anyway though, I'm thoroughly sick of the typical "windows office productivity apps" benchmarking you see on other review sites...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
The first picture in the article - showing the substrate against the gate. Are the very visible lumps in that ... ummmm .... atoms?
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I have two of these Shuttles. Room for two 3.5" hard drives and an optical drive. But still small. I can fit one in my backpack. I also was considering the MacMini, but needed raw cpu power for simulations. Also I wanted more storage than laptop drives have.
The cooling is decent and keeps the temp low for one, but the other one has a Prescott that gets considerably hotter. Not too hot, but several degrees more than if it were just in a normal sized case. If I had known about Prescotts I wouldn't have got one and wouldn't have a problem.
Oh yeah, it's really quiet. 2 feet from my bed and doesn't bother me at all. Not as quiet as the MacMini though. Some of the Shuttles are more quiet than others, so it's helpful to read reviews.
But AMD and Intel aren't the only manufacturers with interesting new chips which Linux runs on.
Freescale has the MPC8641D a dual core e600
IBM has their PowerPC 970 dual core
What about Sun's UltraSparc T1?
I'm just really tired of hearing the same old Intel vs. AMD fan boy flame wars.
And what I'd really like to here about is how well the compilers and or OS is actually using these new processor features or are they just being treated like faster 486s.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Okay, then :) Ignoring for the moment that nobody held a gun to your head and made 'ya read the "fanboy flame wars," let's talk about those other CPUs. Feel free to link to reviews or benchmarks of these CPUs, doing useful stuff like hosting lots of dynamic web sites, acting as file servers for big-ass files, running huge databases, or other things such machines are used for. Be sure to include price tags, please. I am actually pretty curious how these other chips and architectures stand up against Intel and AMD. Obviously the UltraSparcs aren't going to be running many games, but they can encode video like the others, so that'd be an interesting benchmark.
It should already be clear that the 64-bit CPUs (the AMD ones at least) aren't glorified 486 upgrades. Last I checked amd64 doesn't even have that obnoxious x86 legacy memory model crap (640k, then 384k, then 1MB-900(ish)MB, then high-memory to 2GB, then spiffy-uber-high-memory to 4GB or higher), and just has flat memory access. Other improvements supposedly include a wider, faster bus between CPU, memory, and peripherals, and better/faster memory access.
Obviously with dual-core any SMP-capable OS (even good ol' Windows) picks up major performance gains since, well, there's two CPUs. Even with non-multithreaded apps, you get performance gains since the OS starts new processes (and migrates them as needed) to the most-idle CPU.
What do these other non-Intel/non-AMD CPUs bring to the table for spiffy performance?
For what it's worth, I'm not flaming; I'm actually curious :)
Read my stuff.