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Some Istanbul vs Nehalem data can be found here : http://blogs.sun.com/MrBenchmark -benoit W. Wayne Liauh wrote: A few days ago, I upgraded one of my PCs at home to an AMD Quad, and I have noticed a similar surprise in performance differences between OpenSolaris and various Linux distros. (I have no intent of going back to OpenSolaris at least for a while; the reason I did this was because I was unable to install Ubuntu Jaunty from an external CD drive and a 2009.06 LiveCD happened to be nearby.)Of course, I am talking about a totally different issue here--this was about the (reputedly superior) scalability of Solaris as a whole rather than about a particular video driver. (And I am very curious as to how Solaris benchmarks against RedHat on the new six-core AMD Istanbul--or SunFire X4640.) However, getting back to the original thread, the inability of Linux to allow proprietary drivers to be included in the kernel can IMO create great inconveniences. As I am sure many here are aware, nowadays, chipsets are so complex that they, just like today's software code, will, unfortunately and inenvitably, contain bugs, many of them not yet identified. As a common practice, drivers are written by chipset designers deliberatly to circumvent those bugs (which typically will not be published). When some of those bugs are identified and removed, drivers written strictly according to the specs may no longer work. This may explain why Ubuntu Remix, which works flawlessly on the Acer Aspire One netbooks, suddenly has no wi-fi on the newest models although supposedly the same Atheros chipset is used. This leads me to a much bigger issue. Chairman Larry made a big fuss that he wanted to see an alternative to Android on netbooks. I have not seen many discussions on this. However, for pretty much the same reason as I mentioned above, Android may go the same way as Linux did--no netbook manufacturers now are taking it seriously. Perhaps Chairman Larry's idea should be given a serious thought--perhaps an authentic Java plus a scaled-down OpenSolaris should be the way to go? We are not talking about just the netbook market (which is expected to reach 30 million units this year), but also AMD's upcoming traditional notebooks which are thin, light-weight, and low-power-consumption, and will cost not much more than the netbooks. |
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