Silicon Graphics will start showing off the Altix 4000 Monday, the second generation of the company's technical computing machines based on the Linux operating system and Itanium processors.
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Member since:2005-11-12
> Not that the Itanium is a bad choice, it's neck and neck with Power5 for the most powerful processor available.
Yeah right, may be on some synthetic (SPEC) benchmarks Itanic appears to be a close match to Power5, but in reality it is quite a bit behind, just check any more meaningful database or ERP benchmark. If you factor in the price, the price/performance for Power5 is still quite a bit better than Itanic. Anyway, SGI should be starting to think about dumping Itanic and replacing it with AMD Opteron perhaps -- that could really slash the prices that way.
Member since:2005-07-06
Yeah right, may be on some synthetic (SPEC) benchmarks Itanic appears to be a close match to Power5, but in reality it is quite a bit behind, just check any more meaningful database or ERP benchmark.
What does a database or ERP benchmark have to do with a computer designed for scientific computing? For what SGI is selling the Altix for the SPEC fp benchmark is one of the best available. And there is no good reason for SGI to switch to Opteron, it does not provide the performance that the Itanium does for the workloads the Altix is designed for. People buying a system which scales to hundreds of CPUs aren't going to be concerned about the price difference that Opterons would get them.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I think Cray is actually more spot-on than SGI. Cray didn't go the Itanic route and instead chose to use AMD Opteron, which is in my opinion a much better alternative.
It's not like the Opteron existed when SGI started working on the Altix architecture. Or maybe whoever goes back in time to convince everyone to stay with MIPS/IRIX and bring a bunch of Opteron chips with them so that SGI could use that instead of the Itanium.
Not that the Itanium is a bad choice, it's neck and neck with Power5 for the most powerful processor available.
Perhaps Cray should also adopt Solaris as the OS of choice for their servers -- Solaris is an excellent fit for high performance computing taking into consideration that Solaris DTrace, ZFS and Zones could provide phenomenal advantages compared with any other OS out there.
Oh, now I see why you were making the Linux comments you were before, you're a Solaris troll.