[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Chris Hedemark]

On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 13:49, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   *bzzzt*  Moron alert.

More name calling.  That says a lot about your character (or lack
thereof)

Before I suspected, but now I am quite sure, I'm dealing with a common
BS artist that is either (a) regurgitating the same tripe they heard
from someone else who was posting the same nebulous scat but in an
authoritative and confident tone or (b) has convinced their employer to
invest so much $$$ in said hardware that it would look very bad for them
to ever concede that cheaper hardware could be better.

>   Exotic hardware?  No.  Sure, the Crays might be considered "exotic",
> I'll give you that.  But most of the machines here are SPARCs.  The
> SPARC architecture is a modern, scalable IEEE standard.  The x86
> architecture is an old, non-scalable, proprietary architecture dating
> back to the 8-bit era that's completely incompatible with everything
> else.  Now...which is "exotic", again?

How is the x86 not scalable?

I've got an 8MHz x86 box here, and an 800MHz x86 box here (the one I
check mail from in fact).  Then there are the dual 2GHz boxen.  There is
no place to go but up.

If you're talking number of CPU's, this is accurate.  Going much more
than 8 CPU's in one host isn't practical in x86 land.  But I've worked
in a lot of shops, some very big and some very small, and I've had very
limited need for anything bigger than that.  When I do have need, I
reach for the big UltraSPARC boxen.  No argument from me there.  When I
need reliability I reach for the smaller UltraSPARC boxen (sometimes,
though increasingly the Compaq Proliants have been proving their stuff
in the field).  But when it comes down to just getting the job done, as
expediently and as efficiently as possible, my money is often on the
X86.

>   Cheapo CISC clusters?  Oh really.  If you're talking about the Crays
> and Beowulf clusters, yes, a Beowulf cluster can be damn impressive
> from a price/performance standpoint (if your organization doesn't have
> downtime penalties...most do) BUT only for things which parallelize
> well.  

I've never done beowulf so I won't speak for that.

Mosix is more along the lines of what I've worked with.

99% of data centers don't need Crays.  This is evidenced by their
increasing difficulty to find a market for their boxen.

Real world, why on God's green earth would you want to spend $100,000 on
a piece of kit when the job can get done just as well (or better) on
$2,000 to $10,000 worth of kit?  Why can't anyone answer that simple
question?