[rescue] Cleaning out, anyone want some FREE stuff?

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 11:23:55AM -0500, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> On Thursday 13 January 2005 09:51, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 11:42:23PM -0500, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > > Sun machines may have good reliability, but (from experience) don't
> > > have very good compute power.
> >
> > Them's fightin' words, boy. :)
> 
> Have you ever benchmarked an F6800?  IIRC, a 400MHz UltraSparcII had 
> about the same performance, if not better.

No, but if there is any way you can help with that, let me know :-)

I think it really matters what kind of things you do with it. I
understand POWER architecture has really great FP performance.
However for databases, integer performance matters.  I don't know what
POWER does about register windowing, but Sparc always seemed to
deliver good performance even while other things are happening on the
box.

With Solaris 10, the zones and the Dtrace functionality help to
differentiate Solaris from AIX and Linux. 

Sure, AIX can have up to 8 or 16 virtual servers (with certain
hardware), but a lowly U10 can have up to 190 zones (see
http://blogs.sun.com/jclingan ) - and you can have zones on x86, too.
dtrace I have not dug into but I don't think AIX has something like it
at this point.

> Actually, IBM's new OpenPOWER POWER5-based machines are getting to be 
> price-competitive with high-end PC workstation/servers.  Of course, 
> they only are supported using that horrid thing called Linux, and who'd 
> ever want to run that. ; )  

If IBM ever figures out how to market its way out of a wet paper bag ...

--Patrick