From: Peter Farrow <peter@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> looks like the 4500 came second to me by a fair margin,
> between 3x and 5x faster best case,
"Best case" would be something that scales linearlly over many
processors with minimal (<0.1GBps) inter-CPU interconnect,
which is exactly what a cluster (using GbE) is.
In other cases, the old UltraSPARC II was able to keep within
~60% or so, and that's not even looking at the fact that it only
had 2GB -- which _each_ dual-P4 node had as well.
> not what Iwould call limping away.
> Anyway that's enough of this thread, kill it now.....
Here's my final statement.
I have never debated that the P4 isn't more capable than
old UltraSPARC II processors when something clearly relies
on ALU/FPU. Heck, I _still_ deploy refurb/unused dual-P3
850MHz-1.4GHz systems because of this (especially when
interconnect is not the bottleneck).
But there _are_ cases where a more capable interconnect
is what is needed. In those cases, even some older, cheap
UltraSPARC II NUMA/UPA platforms are very useful. E.g.,
we're currently using a 8-way UltraSPARC II as our near-line/
off-line disk/tape backup server, and it's using multiple
out-of-band and storage interconnects.
Now yes, a 4-way HP DL585 would have been much nicer,
and even far more interconnect. But it's clearly better than
a 2-way P4 for what we're using it for.
--
Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx
