[rescue] your next Solaris machine ??? (Sol/x86 booting on iMac)

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 00:19, Skeezics Boondoggle wrote:
>> On Fri, 14 Apr 2006, Andrew Weiss wrote:
>>
>>> [...] The new POWER
>>> 6 is supposed to be pretty light on power use and scale to 6 Ghz.
>>>
>>> The latest POWER5's have like 8 cores on die and like 8MB of cache on
>>> die per processor.  [...]
>> ...which is exactly why Apple's move to Intel couldn't have been more 
>> stupid.  As the "full-blown" POWER architecture evolves and scales, you 
>> know that key improvements would make their way into PowerPC.  And the use 
>> of PPC in gaming platforms means more innovation and drive to improve 
> 
> And how much would that 8-core, 8MB cache per core CPU cost, even at G5
> Mac volumes?  BTW I doubt the current OSX kernel can even scale to 4
> CPUs much less 8.

You can get a POWER5-based system for rougly five grand.

> I am afraid my response will turn this thread into a flamefest, but the
> fact is that the existing POWER stuff didn't make it into the G5, so why
> would you expect any different on a "G6" ?  Look at the specs on even
> the earlier p-series machines (20GBytes/second memory bandwidth on
> STREAM), then compare with what Apple was able to ship.

A bunch of POWER4 features made it into the G5.

Peace...  Sridhar