Check a couple comments up, the 1.6Ghz Opteron scores 1029 Specfp_base2000 vs 840 for the 2Ghz G5 (based of SPEC official results and Apple's published results). Integer results are similar.
The differences in HDD was my bad but its only a $30 difference in price. On the ram I actually speced it with DDR 400 without realizing it, I had used the wrong option on the dropdown box. I could have used a DVD-RW, just happened to pick a +RW because I like the ability to extend the video volume without reformatting the disk, it's nice for home videos dumped from the Mini-DV camcorder. There is basically no speed difference between ECC and non-ECC, they are both CAS3 400MHz chips, ECC just has to do more internally in those three cycles and it needs more data wires. I wouldn't use any workstation or server without ECC, the stuff done on those classes of machines is just too valuable to risk it for the minimal difference in price. You are correct that the video sucks but right now there is no dual Opteron board that supports AGP-Pro, once there is it will probably be less expensive then the $450 for the server class board so figure it plus a 9600 will be about the same as my current config, possibly $100 more.
Using the 142's (still faster than the G5 2Ghz) I built a system at newegg for $1565 with a server class MB, 400W tower case, 120GB SATA hdd and SATA controller, 512MB of ECC DDR 333 ram, Ricoh DVD+RW. The only thing lacking is a good video card, it uses an 8MB onboard chipset. So for half the price I have a computer that is nearly the equal of the dual G5 =)
Maybe because the optimizations require a view of the G5 that does not work with the generic view that GCC has of a processor. IBM tried to submit GCC patches but they were rejected because the GCC team did not like how deeply they affected the GCC core. GCC is THE cross platform compiler, the PPC 970 is enough different from the assumptions it makes that it will not produce optimal code without structural changes and the team doesn't want to do that.
For the kind of money a dual G5 rig costs you can get a dual Opteron that is 50% faster. It's 64bit, supports more memory physically, and runs tons more software. Unless you need one of the Mac optimized apps (64bit Photoshop?) the Opteron solution is probably a better choice.
The press release doesn't say WHICH HP Integrity servers these are based on but for cost reasons I doubt it is the Superdome variant so these are probably only 4-Way nodes connected together with Quadrics interfaces. In that roll the BSD's should be just as capable. Of course the interface cards may not be supported under *BSD and there may be libraries that would not run flawlessly under BSD's linux emulation layer but those should mostly be flaws that can be overcome.
You just never noticed anyone else. In fact about 1/2 of the supercomputer top 500 is comprised of IBM POWER series systems. This was higher about 2 years ago but more comodity clusters are making the list pushing out the older POWER3 based systems.
FLOPS/Watt the Opteron is comparable to every other processor out there, the G5, Itanium 2, Opteron, POWER4, etc all use about the same amount of power per instruction. Check out their Specfp_base2000 scores and compare them to average thermal power output, they are all in the same ballpark give or take about 10%. Check out my post Here for some concrete numbers for the G5 and Opteron.
I ran Mozilla for several years on a couple P2-300 systems, both had 192MB though. It was plenty fast, I just used the quicklaunch feature and rarely closed Mozilla. See if you can't upgrade the ram (if it takes standard SO-Dimm's it will be dirt cheap) and I think you will find Mozilla much more pleasent.
Mozilla surpased IE a couple years ago when it incorporated tabbed browsing, configurable popup blocking, configurable cookie blocking, configurable image blocking, etc. Modern versions of IE are just as resource intensive, although you may not realize it because of the way Windows reports resource usage. Besides Mozilla has been free of Netscape code since the fist Milestone builds, they scrapped all that code 9 months into the Mozilla project.
You just have sucky drives. Good 7200rpm IDE drives can do around 45-50MB/s sustained, 10k and 15k rpm SCSI even better and thats for a single drive. I've already had situations where multiple GigE connections to the Netapp cluster were at 100% utilization when multiple clients were doing large transfers. You are correct that your average home network won't need anything past GigE before this comes out but that's not what this is for =)
GigE works fine over Cat-5e cabling up to 100m. 10GigE needs fibre now and there will be a copper solution in the future that will need Cat-6. People selling you Cat-6 for GigE are just making extra money on the higher margins for Cat-6. Putting in 62.5/125nm MM fibre wouldn't be a bad idea although it gets really expensive really fast. My personal choice would be Cat-5e along with some nylon cord and pulleys so you can pull new cabling if you need to in the future.
10Gig Ethernet break backward compatibility from what I understand. You can no longer hook up a downlevel device and have the NIC and port autonegotiate to the lower speed.
That was a single drive 2 years ago. This isn't for connecting your disk to your motherboard, it's for connecting the grid of DB servers that Wallmart will have to their warehouse full of disks.
Where will you find a Firewire cable long enough to reach the disk on the other side of the country? Studios already run into length limits with Firewire all the time, a multistory office building would be impossible to wire for Firewire everywhere. Plus Firewire networking equipment is basically non-existant, there are no failover, multipath, routed Firewire implementations because that's not what it's for, it's for a cheap multipurpose local connection. There are great uses for Firewire like Magik but it is definitly not the end all and be all of storage connections.
Just because a routing device has a switching fabric fast enough to keep up with the torrent does not mean a deaktop or even normal server will have a bus capable of it. For instance the Cisco 6509 has a switching fabric capable of 720Gbps (.72Tb/s), no computer that I know of can come anywhere near that. As to 100Mb/s ethernet, I see it swamped all the time by even 1U servers and workstations. The typical office user will probably only max it if they are saving a large MS Office doc to their home server across the LAN, but even that is not uncommon.
You forget that ethernet equipment is superior and cheaper. For instance you can use a pair of Cisco 6509's with 10Gb blades and use redundant NIC's (even pair them up if you like with channel bonding) and get a SAN infrastructure that beats anything FC in throughput, reliability, and it won't cost more than a decent 2Gb FC setup. If TCP processing is actually an issue then use offloading NIC's (though they rarely beat Linux's software implementation in spead).
1.8Ghz Opteron-84.7W Max Thermal Power Disipation 1.8Ghz PPC 970-42W TYPICAL (no Max listed) Typical on the Operon is probably around 65W, so about 50% higher. Given the Opterons superior performance (Specfp_base2000 of 1209 vs 840 for the G5 and Specint_base2000 of 1248 vs 800 for the G5) I would say on an instruction per watt basis they are tied =)
p.s. Apple's idea of a processor whitepaper is a farking joke! The thing reads like a press release for gods sake, I had to go to IBM to find a proper whitepaper for the PPC970.
Opteron won't but the Athlon 64 will, and soon. AMD has moved up the launch date for the new Athlon line based around the Opteron core to Sept 23rd. Of course much like Apple with the G5 the Athlon 64's true prowess won't be felt for some time as a full 64bit consumer OS isn't yet out for it. For now to take full advantage of either CPU you will need Linux.
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You could do it with external RAID-5 arrays that present themselves as a single SCSI disk and then use a SCSI RAID controller to mirror them.
Check a couple comments up, the 1.6Ghz Opteron scores 1029 Specfp_base2000 vs 840 for the 2Ghz G5 (based of SPEC official results and Apple's published results). Integer results are similar.
Except the Opteron is much faster clock for clock so you don't need the 2Ghz Opteron, the 1.6Ghz Opteron is already 25% faster than the G5 2Ghz.
The differences in HDD was my bad but its only a $30 difference in price. On the ram I actually speced it with DDR 400 without realizing it, I had used the wrong option on the dropdown box. I could have used a DVD-RW, just happened to pick a +RW because I like the ability to extend the video volume without reformatting the disk, it's nice for home videos dumped from the Mini-DV camcorder. There is basically no speed difference between ECC and non-ECC, they are both CAS3 400MHz chips, ECC just has to do more internally in those three cycles and it needs more data wires. I wouldn't use any workstation or server without ECC, the stuff done on those classes of machines is just too valuable to risk it for the minimal difference in price. You are correct that the video sucks but right now there is no dual Opteron board that supports AGP-Pro, once there is it will probably be less expensive then the $450 for the server class board so figure it plus a 9600 will be about the same as my current config, possibly $100 more.
Spec official benchmarks for the Opteron 142, Specfp_base2000 of 1029 vs Apples own published scores for the G5 2Ghz of 840.
Using the 142's (still faster than the G5 2Ghz) I built a system at newegg for $1565 with a server class MB, 400W tower case, 120GB SATA hdd and SATA controller, 512MB of ECC DDR 333 ram, Ricoh DVD+RW. The only thing lacking is a good video card, it uses an 8MB onboard chipset. So for half the price I have a computer that is nearly the equal of the dual G5 =)
Doing processor emulation is very computationally expensive so that isn't an option. The Opteron boards supports 12GB of ram.
Maybe because the optimizations require a view of the G5 that does not work with the generic view that GCC has of a processor. IBM tried to submit GCC patches but they were rejected because the GCC team did not like how deeply they affected the GCC core. GCC is THE cross platform compiler, the PPC 970 is enough different from the assumptions it makes that it will not produce optimal code without structural changes and the team doesn't want to do that.
For the kind of money a dual G5 rig costs you can get a dual Opteron that is 50% faster. It's 64bit, supports more memory physically, and runs tons more software. Unless you need one of the Mac optimized apps (64bit Photoshop?) the Opteron solution is probably a better choice.
The press release doesn't say WHICH HP Integrity servers these are based on but for cost reasons I doubt it is the Superdome variant so these are probably only 4-Way nodes connected together with Quadrics interfaces. In that roll the BSD's should be just as capable. Of course the interface cards may not be supported under *BSD and there may be libraries that would not run flawlessly under BSD's linux emulation layer but those should mostly be flaws that can be overcome.
You just never noticed anyone else. In fact about 1/2 of the supercomputer top 500 is comprised of IBM POWER series systems. This was higher about 2 years ago but more comodity clusters are making the list pushing out the older POWER3 based systems.
FLOPS/Watt the Opteron is comparable to every other processor out there, the G5, Itanium 2, Opteron, POWER4, etc all use about the same amount of power per instruction. Check out their Specfp_base2000 scores and compare them to average thermal power output, they are all in the same ballpark give or take about 10%. Check out my post Here for some concrete numbers for the G5 and Opteron.
I ran Mozilla for several years on a couple P2-300 systems, both had 192MB though. It was plenty fast, I just used the quicklaunch feature and rarely closed Mozilla. See if you can't upgrade the ram (if it takes standard SO-Dimm's it will be dirt cheap) and I think you will find Mozilla much more pleasent.
Mozilla surpased IE a couple years ago when it incorporated tabbed browsing, configurable popup blocking, configurable cookie blocking, configurable image blocking, etc. Modern versions of IE are just as resource intensive, although you may not realize it because of the way Windows reports resource usage. Besides Mozilla has been free of Netscape code since the fist Milestone builds, they scrapped all that code 9 months into the Mozilla project.
You just have sucky drives. Good 7200rpm IDE drives can do around 45-50MB/s sustained, 10k and 15k rpm SCSI even better and thats for a single drive. I've already had situations where multiple GigE connections to the Netapp cluster were at 100% utilization when multiple clients were doing large transfers. You are correct that your average home network won't need anything past GigE before this comes out but that's not what this is for =)
GigE works fine over Cat-5e cabling up to 100m. 10GigE needs fibre now and there will be a copper solution in the future that will need Cat-6. People selling you Cat-6 for GigE are just making extra money on the higher margins for Cat-6. Putting in 62.5/125nm MM fibre wouldn't be a bad idea although it gets really expensive really fast. My personal choice would be Cat-5e along with some nylon cord and pulleys so you can pull new cabling if you need to in the future.
10Gig Ethernet break backward compatibility from what I understand. You can no longer hook up a downlevel device and have the NIC and port autonegotiate to the lower speed.
That was a single drive 2 years ago. This isn't for connecting your disk to your motherboard, it's for connecting the grid of DB servers that Wallmart will have to their warehouse full of disks.
Where will you find a Firewire cable long enough to reach the disk on the other side of the country? Studios already run into length limits with Firewire all the time, a multistory office building would be impossible to wire for Firewire everywhere. Plus Firewire networking equipment is basically non-existant, there are no failover, multipath, routed Firewire implementations because that's not what it's for, it's for a cheap multipurpose local connection. There are great uses for Firewire like Magik but it is definitly not the end all and be all of storage connections.
Just because a routing device has a switching fabric fast enough to keep up with the torrent does not mean a deaktop or even normal server will have a bus capable of it. For instance the Cisco 6509 has a switching fabric capable of 720Gbps (.72Tb/s), no computer that I know of can come anywhere near that. As to 100Mb/s ethernet, I see it swamped all the time by even 1U servers and workstations. The typical office user will probably only max it if they are saving a large MS Office doc to their home server across the LAN, but even that is not uncommon.
I guess your servers don't have PCI-X or Infiband then =)
You forget that ethernet equipment is superior and cheaper. For instance you can use a pair of Cisco 6509's with 10Gb blades and use redundant NIC's (even pair them up if you like with channel bonding) and get a SAN infrastructure that beats anything FC in throughput, reliability, and it won't cost more than a decent 2Gb FC setup. If TCP processing is actually an issue then use offloading NIC's (though they rarely beat Linux's software implementation in spead).
1.8Ghz Opteron-84.7W Max Thermal Power Disipation
1.8Ghz PPC 970-42W TYPICAL (no Max listed)
Typical on the Operon is probably around 65W, so about 50% higher. Given the Opterons superior performance (Specfp_base2000 of 1209 vs 840 for the G5 and Specint_base2000 of 1248 vs 800 for the G5) I would say on an instruction per watt basis they are tied =)
p.s.
Apple's idea of a processor whitepaper is a farking joke! The thing reads like a press release for gods sake, I had to go to IBM to find a proper whitepaper for the PPC970.
It's called processor affinity, look into it, like all SMP aware OS's windows supports it.
Opteron won't but the Athlon 64 will, and soon. AMD has moved up the launch date for the new Athlon line based around the Opteron core to Sept 23rd. Of course much like Apple with the G5 the Athlon 64's true prowess won't be felt for some time as a full 64bit consumer OS isn't yet out for it. For now to take full advantage of either CPU you will need Linux.