On Sun, 2002-05-26 at 10:52, Phil Payne wrote: > > Your I/O bus is typically PCI however so you are limited to about > > 100Mbytes/second I/O throughput in the real world. > > I would regard 100Mb/sec as a peak (instantaneous) transfer rate. Throughput will >be only a > fraction of that. On some tests only a small fraction.
That really depends on the system. On an Athlon with 64bit PCI I can do 150Mbyte/second peak I/O , 120Mbyte/second sustained. Thats with about $10,000 of loaner hard disks. The sustained disk read/write speed for a single UDMA hard disk is about a magnitude lower. > The functionality and the performance are indeed there, but they are of no benefit >to 99.999% > of the chip's purchasers. Making an issue out of it as a 'superiority' of that >platform > distracts purchasers from price/benefit issues that are much more relveant to their > environments, and does the industry as a whole a disservice. Lets take a real world benchmark. On < $2000 of PC I can recompile the entire Linux kernel in 3 minutes, and the entirity of XFree86 in 30. I can saturate multiple 100Mbit links with web traffic. I can encode video in real time to mpeg and burn it to VideoCD as I go. I can render 1024x768 3D scenes with texture and lighting at 80frames/second. All of those happen to be useful to me. I think you misunderstand some of the nature of the commodity processors. >> Performance measurement should be left to those who know what they're doing. The >first step > is to define terms of measurement, and these must be related to real world and real >user > issues, so that the results are relevant to their audience. Understand that the majority audience isn't interested in bit errors per year, component failures per year, floor space per 100Mbyte/sec throughput. They won't be until those features like the FPU become economical using either hardware or software to drop into mainstream cheap processor silicon. Why is that relevant - because the computing mainstream press understands the computing mainstream. They care about desktop performance properties (latency over throughput, price/performance, etc). Getting them to think in other terms is hard, especially when any attempt to get public IBM comparisons that are third party verified is hitting a wall of silence. Alan
