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Unholy Matrimony? Microsoft and Cray
fetusbear writes with a ZDNet story that says "'Microsoft and Cray are set to unveil on September 16 the Cray CX1, a compact supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008. The pair is expected to tout the new offering as "the most affordable supercomputer Cray has ever offered," with pricing starting at $25,000.' Although this would be the lowest cost hardware ever offered by Cray, it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft."
instead of bloggy blather, you can go to the source.
A dual core Pentium 1.6GHZ with 2GB RAM?
you tell me
Actually, if you go to the Cray site and configure a system, it is available with Red Hat Linux for no cost (getting HPC adds $469)
Are you trying to imply that Cray the company is "in name only?" Because that's not at all the case.
It's true that Cray was a shadow of its former self after Tera bought it, but many of the Tera executives have left, and some of what Cray Research used to be has re-emerged.
Now, the CX1 really is Cray in name only. Don't make the mistake of thinking of Cray as a maker of itty bitty clusters. Oak Ridge has a >30,000 core Cray XT4, NERSC has an almost 20,000-core XT4, and of course Red Storm has over 26,000 cores.
Mods aren't always retarded. Sometimes they mod comments as "Insightful" because they want to give some karma to the comment-poster. Funny doesn't give karma.
There's a reason for that. It doesn't deserve karma.
The quality of discussion is no longer assisted by the moderation system because it has been subject to gaming. Humorous comments should be highlighted for enjoyment, but that's what the "funny" mod is for--it doesn't mean the poster has anything valuable to contribute, which is what the mod points are for. It doesn't mean the poster is considered to provide constructive, valuable comments as a general rule, which is what karma is for.
Likewise, with the -1 mods all collapsing into "I disagree" or "this opinion has not been sanctioned by the hive", Slashdot has become an echo chamber and encouraged rabid zealotry. When anger boils over at opposition comments being smashed down, it actually creates flamebait and troll posts--which are then modded UP when they come into vogue.
Case in point: most comments about "Apple fanboys" or anything anti-IP, no matter how uninformed or ill-conceived. These are ignorant, incoherent posts but up they go because it's an acceptable viewpoint.
More importantly, newer kernels *feel* faster. In particular the kernel preemption makes an enormous difference as far as perceived speed goes (for a desktop user).
When I upgraded from 2.4.24 to one of the early 2.6 releases I was astounded at how much faster things felt. On a very modest laptop (1.3 GHz Pentium-M, 512M RAM, 30G 5400 RPM hard drive) from a fresh boot I fired up OpenOffice, Konqueror, Eclipse, Firefox (might have still been Mozilla then, I forget) all at the same time, and the desktop was still liquid smooth and completely responsive. Needless to say, a similar task on 2.4 felt much slower, as actually getting the K menu to open again so I could select another program to start out of it took longer.
Newer kernels are actually faster in a lot of cases too, particularly with scalability, but lots of other optimizations have been done as well, as many kernel developers keep a very close eye on performance. Also, GCC has gotten better over time, and likely optimizes the kernel quite a bit better now than it could several years ago.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!