On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 11:33:25AM +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote: > However, before you choose, I'd also take a look at IBM's power4/5 > systems. At least from a design perspective, their multi-core design is > top dog.
If I were you I would consider the Macintosh systems. Apple recently dropped their power implementation in favor of Intel. In less than two years there will be no current production power Macintoshes. In some ways this will be good, at some point there will be a "fire sale" on G5 Macintoshes. However it also means that the Macintosh specific Linux distributions will fade. Right now you can get a Mac mini with a 1.4 gHz G4 for under $700 plus VAT from Yeda. You can run GCC on the enclosed (BSD) MacOS or there are several versions of Linux that run on it (Yellowdog, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian). It's integer performance is quite impressive. A rack full of them would make a nice cheap "loosley coupled" processor array. Apple has made it clear that Macintosh computers will run any standard X86 operating system with the correct device drivers. However due to DRM hardware, MacOS will not run on non Macintosh computers. On another note, Microsoft is using a dual core implementation of the power architecture on the new X-BOX 3. They did their early development on dual processor G5 Macintoshes. If they don't change the processor architecture too much, it may be what you need at a reasonable price point. One advantage of the power processors is that they are BIG ENDIAN. If you have a legacy application from a big endian processor or big endian data, you may find the transition to power much easier than to X86. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (077)-424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Support the growing boycott of Google by radio users and hobbyists. It's starting to work, Yahoo has suprassed Google. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
