On Jan 17, 2006, at 12:55 PM, Robert Thorpe wrote:
That I very much doubt. UltraSPARCs have been slower than
even middle
of the road PCs for years now.
Doubt it all you want, I'm running dozens of them in
production, my friend. There's more to computer performance
than processor clock speed.
It probably depends on what you're doing. At the place I work all the
unix machines have been replaced because PCs were found to be faster.
I've never found an application where a workstation can beat a decent
Xeon, and they certainly rarely do in benchmarks, but I can believe
they
exist.
Of-course for multi-processing they're much better, and built to a high
standard.
That's probably the big difference. Out of nearly thirty machines
running here I believe only three of them are uniprocessor boxes. The
biggest of the Suns here was recently upgraded to eight processors
(with 8MB of L2 cache each!) and 8GB of RAM, the biggest SGI machine
has sixteen processors, and the largest Cray has twelve.
The *disk controller* for the biggest of the Sun machines has two
processors and 1GB of RAM. This is a big departure from the incredibly
stupid "one processor must do EVERYTHING in the box" mentality of PC
systems-level architecture.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL
