Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: AMD K6 233 Cpu 465 BogoMips?? | Date | Fri, 4 Sep 1998 14:41:49 -0500 (CDT) | From | kwrohrer@ce ... |
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And lo, Alex Buell saith unto me: > > On Fri, 4 Sep 1998 Michael_Barillier@CYBORG.COM wrote: > > > Just gloating for a sec here, but my new AMD K6 300 is cranking out a mere > > 599 BogoMips. :) Quite an improvement over the old '486 33MHz that crawled > > at 16+ ... > > Yes, but they still haven't done a SMP system. IMHO they should get off > their butts and design their own SMP system (which Linux could support by > adding AMD specific code) that should be superior to that of Intel's > (which still doesn't scale to more than 4 Intel processors unfortunately) > SMP solution. I'd definitely buy into that. Correct me if I'm wrong > though. > I disagree; while we might wish AMD would do an x86 SMP system and get some chipset vendor and motherboard maker(s) to support it, it doesn't make good business sense for AMD. Look at how Intel is struggling now with Chrome* and other efforts trying to come up with an excuse for people who can afford a high-end Intel processor to want one.
The market for those who truly need performance is smaller, better informed, and more likely able to go with a non-x86 platform (and non-Windows OS). SMP PowerPC or Alpha could fly, but I expect that even Beowulf builders will soon find than an extra case, network connection, and IDE disk won't cost as much as the price premium for a good SMP motherboard. This will only become more true as prices in general begin to fall, unless SMP becomes a serious fad...
...and for that to happen, we'd need "commodity-user" applications that need SMP's computing power (which Intel can't pay people enough to discover) but are readily parallelizable, talented programmers who understand how to program for concurrency, and a popular OS and libraries which were designed with SMP, concurrency, and scalability in mind.
So far the closest we come is that 3D games can readily parallelize screen redraws...but a Voodoo II board already has such a good frame rate that you don't even notice SLI at high resolutions any more.
When the masses of parents and others who flock to Best Buy have been convinced that they want SMP, they will get it...and the commodity SMP systems will be crap. If you want quality anything, you don't want the commodity version...not yet, anyway.
Keith
-- "The avalanche has already started; |Linux: http://www.linuxhq.com |"Zooty, it is too late for the pebbles to |KDE: http://www.kde.org | zoot vote." Kosh, "Believers", Babylon 5 |Keith: kwrohrer@enteract.com | zoot!" www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html |http://www.enteract.com/~kwrohrer | --Rebo
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