[rescue] Advice on Octanes

Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez lefa at ucsc.edu
Tue Sep 23 18:10:43 CDT 2003


On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

>
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
>
> > I call it perception, I do have an Octane too.... sorry to burst your
> > bubble. Perception != reality.
>
> I don't know about your idea of perception, but if this is just
> perception, my imagination can get a whole lot of work done.  A
> reasonably well-configured system -does- beat the hell out of reasonably
> well-configured P3 for many sorts of work, especially for anything
> involving floating-point numbers or heavy I/O.

2 things we went from the memory subsystem to this. I have no idea what
P3s you are using, but I have both an Octane and a P3. For the sort of
stuff that I do, as much as I love the Octane I have to use the P3 to run
heavy duty simulations because the R10K is quite long in the tooth to tell
you the truth. The balancing factor being the Octane is much older and it
holds pretty well, but it just can not be compared to a P3 or an Athlon
for raw number crunching.

  PCI can't touch XIO and
> a puny "northbridge" chip can't touch the Octane's HEART chip in terms
> of latency, concurrency, and bandwidth.

Again it depends on what system you are using. XIO is a switched subsystem
not a bus like PCI, however if you can find a decently priced XIO board
for any non graphics stuff then you must be blessed with luck.



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