[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Chris Hedemark]

Mike, thank you for being the grown up here and actually debating the
issue on meritorious points.  I have a lot more respect for your
approach than for Mr. McGuire's (regardless of his standing within this
mailing list).

On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 15:33, Michael Schiller wrote:

> 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.

Sure, you're lucky to get 2 or 3 years out of the crap that is being
pushed to the bottom end consumer in the PC market.  Even the big guys
like Compaq, Dell, etc. are peddling cheap wares to the masses.  I got
burned on something like that once (once) around 1994 buying an Acer
box.  Every machine I've owned since then has been home rolled.

Yes, you're right, reliability of the bottom end stuff is a major issue
in the PC world and I make no excuse for it.

> 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.

Hmmm I had heard that Solaris 9 wouldn't run on anything earlier than a
sun4u but haven't actually tried the betas yet.

Your use of a Sparcstation LX for running DNS services is exactly what I
endorsed the platform for.  DNS doesn't need to be speedy, but it needs
to be darned near 100% reliable.  And I fully endorse the use of low end
Sun boxen for that use.

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

I would argue though that the 486 processor was not designed for a
specific OS.  Intel has a track record of supporting the development of
multiple OS's for its architecture.  Of course Linux was just a dorm
room experiment back when 486 was king of the desktop, but SCO was still
one of the OS's Intel was helping out back then, and the latest version
will still run on a 486/66.

Remember, x86 != Windows.

> 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?

I agree they have staying power.  They were very well designed boxes. 
More and more such systems though are being pushed off to handle network
infrastructure duties (mail relay, DNS, dhcp, etc) while more
challenging tasks are increasingly being moved to x86

> Sure, PC's are great if you're ready to throw them out 2 years from now, 

I won't throw out anything newer than a Pentium 60 on the x86 side.  I
would keep older stuff too except my house is getting full so I have to
raise the bar a little.

If you are running the latest flavor of MS Windows yes I agree that in 2
or 3 years most PC's become obsolete.

I however have a preference for OpenBSD for most server tasks and Linux
for most desktop tasks.  Of course OpenBSD is not scalable to SMP
machines (which is what started this thread in the first place) but my
rinky dink little Pentium 100 boxes with 16M RAM and 1.2G HDD have no
problem running OpenBSD, bind, dhcpd, etc.  If you haven't seen an IBM
PC330, I think it was a machine well ahead of its time and the
manufacturing quality exceeded most PC machines of that time or now. 
It's no wonder that here we are like 7 or 8 years later and I'm still
using the things.

> 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.

I don't do windows.