[geeks] New Itanium machines from SGI

[Mike Meredith]

On Wednesday 08 January 2003 6:27 pm, Dave McGuire wrote:
> When process technology hits the laws-of-physics-imposed barrier of
> ~4GHz or so (by the last estimates I read) who's gonna be faster?

MIPS of course.

I wasn't aware of the ~4GHz barrier (I'm not a h/w person). It's going 
to be interesting to see what happens when people have to do something 
other than just turn the handle faster to get more performance.

>    Also, if performance is the name of the game, then SMP is king.
> Which ones scale better in SMP configurations?

Hey! I'm just a system administrator with delusions of grandeur. But I'd 
guess that an SGI full of Itaniums running an SGI tuned version of 
Linux would scale better than something produced by a Taiwanese PC 
manufacturer with a bunch of MIPS CPUs.

I'd guess that an SGI Origin would scale better than an SGI Altix, but 
that might be more because of IRIX than the CPU.