On 02/15/2011 08:40 AM, Chandrashekar Babu wrote: > Intel does manufacture them and they are the norm for > many high-end HP and IBM servers that run Linux and > HP/UX or AIX as of today.
erm, where did you get the impression that AIX runs on ia64 hardware ? way back in 1999 or 2000 they had a preview release which was, rumour has it, only bought by 1 small company somewhere for a dozen machines. That was about the entire outing for aix on ia64. The original itanium and the follow on itanic2 are pretty much dead and have been for a long time. There might be some niche markets where its still relevant, but its not the enterprise computing side of things. It completely failed to gain any relevant market through its entire life cycle, much like the Alpha it was generically derived from. If you want to buy IA64 today, you need to throw a lot of money at HP and have to essentially setup your own support infrastructure around it. Neither Intel nor HP are very keen on selling ia64 these days ( based on personal experience... ) > BTW, the Linux kernel team (from Intel, HP and IBM > largely) still maintain the ia64 arch code. Do they really ? most kernel features for ia64 lag behind mainstream, and lack of people willing to maintain linux/ia64 has lead to most vendors dropping support for it - the last major market player still working with IA64 ( red hat ) stopped as well. > AMD Opteron is a good option (I remember playing with > Sun blades - V20z) powered by Opteron. Their overall The V20z isnt a SunBlade machine, its a SunFire series. > performance was good, but for intensive math computations > (that my client required for their graphics simulation > applications), it did not do as fast as their older > HP Proliant server powered by Intel Itanium. So let me get this right, you are comparing a 2004 Opteron with a 2004 IA64 right ? How about something from the last year or so. Intel has pretty much wiped the floor with AMD's offering in the generic x86 markets since then. > Recently (2 years back) Acer service center took 47 days > to repair my Acer Timeline laptop that failed within 3 days ouch, sounds like a good reason to not buy Acer. I had (have!) an Acer Ferrari 4005 ( 2Ghz dual core Turion ) laptop that I got many years back, totally loved it - but never really used it all the way a laptop should be used since it ran very hot and the fans on there were super loud. It just sat around the place and got used as a desktop replacement :/ On the other hand, it ran Solaris/x86_64 ( not that i ever found a use for it beyond personal amusement ). Back to the real Topic : here are 2 data points for references on atom performance: - a dual core atpm (for what intel call dual core on the atom ) runs a torrent host for centos, and under test was able to deliver 255mbps to 100 clients simultaneously. - I worked with someone late summer last year to setup a rack full of atom machines, 4 to a 1U chasis, each with 2gb ram, its own disk and a gigabit network interface. 120 such machine instances were used to host partitioned pgsql db's. We were able to saturate ( ~ 700mbps ) in native sql out of this cluster. Cost of cooling this setup was almost the same as cost of computing hardware; but comparative costs of other solutions was massive. - KB _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
