[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Chris Hedemark]

On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 12:27, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   - There's more to computer performance than the clock speed of the
> processor.

Yep.  But when you are doing CPU intensive work it sure counts for a
hell of a lot.

I've always found those nebulous arguments against PeeCee hardware
interesting.  Usually unfounded in recent fact, but interesting
nonetheless.  When put to the test though I've found that dollar for
dollar a PeeCee running UNIX will spank a RISC box running UNIX.

And except for very exotic needs where you must have 16+ processors on
one host for whatever reason, it's hard to beat a dual athlon box with a
gig of RAM, some 15KRPM LVD SCSI hard drives, and Linux.

In reality, when I was running a simulation farm for a DSP design house,
I put this age old argument to the test.  The cruddy PeeCee with 256MB
RAM and 8GB IDE hard drive spanked the $100,000 Sun soundly running the
actual EDA tools that the engineers were using.

Needless to say our Sun purchases plummeted after that, while
productivity surged upwards and user morale was similarly high.

Maybe four or five years ago there was some truth to the idea that UNIX
ran better on RISC than on CISC.

Today it seems like more of a Ford vs. Chevy or vi vs. emacs kind of
bickering.  Lots of words with no fact to back them up.

>   - That's not a UNIX box.  It's a PeeCee running UNIX.

Are you still hurting from a sun getting spanked from a PeeCee?

I like RISC hardware for its unique qualities.  Performance is not one
of those qualities.  Not CPU, not overall, not anywhere really. 
Sometimes it is nice to have 64 bit pointers.  Why do I like RISC
hardware?  Simply put, it is usually better built & better integrated. 
It's not a collection of off the shelf parts haphazardly slapped
together to extract maximum possible performance at the cost of longer
term dependability.  For applications that absolutely positively must
run 24x7 with five nines of reliability, I choose the slower but more
reliable RISC hardware.

For applications that require best possible performance, I go for the
collection of off the shelf parts haphazardly slapped together to
extract maximum possible performance at the cost of longer term
dependability.  Sure you might have a higher failure rate, but the short
& infrequent windows of downtime are more than compensated for by the
excellent ratio of productivity to dollars spent.