On Wednesday, 18 April 2001 at 23:17:06 -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Dennis wrote:
>
>>> You think Intel isn't going to market dual/quad ia64 machines?
>>
>> Yes, but who'll need them?
>
> If nobody needed them, what would be the point in SELLING
> them ?
That's never been an argument for a good salesperson. Think of
selling refrigerators to Eskimos, or the small farmer with one cow who
bought a milking machine and sold his cow to pay for it.
> I know you don't trust our technical instinct, but you might
> at least consider the business instinct of companies like
> Intel, IBM or Unisys (who all sell big SMP systems).
>
> Besides, there are LOTS of people who need tomorrow's performance
> yesterday. There will always be a big market for overpowered,
> overpriced SMP systems...
And, of course, a bigger market for high-powered, reasonably priced MP
systems. Note that it's cheaper to buy an SMP Intel MB with two 750
MHz processors than it is to buy one with a 1.5 GHz processor.
> And as for the "but you can wait 2 years until UP is faster than
> today's SMP" doesn't quite work for eg. investment banking and stock
> funds. More computing power means better calculations, which means
> more money. And for folks like them, computing power is not measured
> in FLOPS, but in ACRES. And when you're talking 3 acres of computing
> power, you'd better have some decend density (ie. SMP in 2U
> rackmounted boxes, or something similarly suitable).
More to the point, the processors of the not-too-distant future will
have multiple processors on the single die. Multiprocessors are here
to stay.
Greg
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