[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Michael Schiller]

> Chris Hedemark wrote:
>
>   I'd rather have an actual computer than a down payment towards one.
>

Chris:

Ok, it's real simple. Real machines are designed to last a LONG time. As an
example, My mother had a Compaq PC that she bought a few years back, and it came
with a 2 gig HD. after less than a year and a half the motherboard died, so they
ended up replacing the whole machine, because the new mb wouldn't work with the
old drive / memory, etc.

When it comes to 'real' hardware, I have a Sun Sparcstation LX running as one of
my nameservers. It's currently running Solaris 8, but soon I will upgrade it to
Solaris 9. The LX has a 50mhz microsparc CPU in it, approximately equivalent to
a 486/66.

Tell me, how many 486/66 machines can run the current version of the OS they
were originally designed for? Any?

While Sun is selling systems now that are either at or just under 1ghz (I don't
keep up with all their newer systems) there are still plenty of places that are
using older Sun hardware, how many places that do serious computing are using 5
- 6 year old Intel machines?

Sure, PC's are great if you're ready to throw them out 2 years from now, and buy
all new ones, as well as upgrade all your software because it no longer runs on
the latest version of Windows, but if you want a platform that's more stable
than that you need a REAL machine.

-Mike

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