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SubjectRe: AMD K6 233 Cpu 465 BogoMips??
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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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