The collected works of SAQ - Page 6

My complaint isn't that I personally love Windows and care that it doesn't run on my own Itanium hardware, but that this is a win for x86/x64. Maybe I'm stupid and obsolete, but I refuse to believe that that architecture is the future or anything close to it...

The following is on a minimal amount of sleep, and may not be entirely coherent.

Honestly, I don't think you need to worry. SPARC and IA64 are both seemingly at death's door, but POWER is going strong, and plenty of new chipmakers (Tilera, for example) are coming into the market. I would not be surprised to see a "RISC Renaissance" in the high end as personal computing becomes increasingly based on thin-client type technologies (like "cloud computing.") All the architectural band-aids in the world can't make x86's disadvantages go away. The really cost-sensitive segments (desktops and laptops, netbooks, etc) are already about as fast as they need to be, and will probably stick with x86 until something better (ARM?) comes along that can run the same software at a reasonable speed. On the other hand, RISC is still the fastest thing around on severs and large-scale workstations, where performance still matters, and I think that will increasingly shift in RISC's favor. x86 just isn't that fast, doesn't comfortably go above about six cores without MCM's, and in general it's I/O and memory bandwidth don't come close to RISC solutions, especially POWER. Nehalem goes a long way toward correcting this, but getting relatively close in performance to the Power6, which is last-gen, really isn't good enough.

I predict RISC workstations will, in fact, come back. I think personal computing processors over the next few years are going to be more architecturally to embedded processors than to workstation/server processors, and that personal computing will always be where Intel and (probably) AMD do the most R&D. This leaves a hole in workstation and server processors that the fast RISC chips have an excellent chance to fill. I don't think that SiCortex was the last attempt at making RISC workstations; I think it was one of the first of the new generation.

@SAQ - that's one of those things I just don't understand. PA-RISC was not slow, faster for a lot of things than most or all of its competitors. There's a good reason PA-RISC systems stayed on the top500 until a couple years ago, so why were they so desperate to drop it? Was there a good economic reason or was this just Fiorina-era bullshit?

I bet there is some pretty pissed off people at HP, as they have basically screwed themselves out of control of their own destiny... So where will they be in 5-10 years from now? Trying to fab their own Itaniums? Or porting to the x64..?

I don't think anyone does

The older versions of gcc still work on the old hardware so I don't see a problem, myself. New software isn't going to run well on Personal Iris anyhow.

I've had the same experience. Both my Apple III and Apple Lisa had tatalums explode in their power supplies with huge quantities of acrid smoke pouring out the vents, and both machines continue to operate just fine without them.

Very nice! I only have one system, a surprisingly snappy AlphaServer 1000 (4/266) , but I'm very happy with it nonetheless. I hope to get a hold of something more powerful in the future, like the rx2600 or rx2620 , like some (lucky) people on the forum own.



I assume you mean DECnet? I'm familiar with it, but I've never tried coupling a cluster on longer distances, only in local networks, is what I meant. Also, I think you'd have to run 7.3 or 8.x with ODS/2 (without hard links), for file system backward compatibility.

I know what you mean now, I forgot; the similarity in names must've confused me. I know they can work nicely, it has been one of VMS' selling points afterall, I was just not sure how it could be done with hobbyist licensed nodes.

Just look at Windows NT/2000 on Alpha, Mickeysofts tryouts in the PPC/MIPS territory, rescent IA64-venture... It all boils down to the volume segment and where they can get enough money for their investments. Just about any company financial director would look at the facts and just axe it, like they've done several times before.

Only Compaq engineers would think that was a good idea.

Right; there are compiler options that will need to be set but my concern was more the MIPS-3 flavor libraries I imagine most software will need to compile against and setting that up on the build machine. I would also like to know people's general experience cross compiling between MIPS-3 and MIPS-4.

Put me down for one of those, too. It would be a nice step up from my U5. If local, I'll happily drive over and pick it up from you.

I too have soft spot for the SS20. The memory max is 512MB [8x64mb] you can use the later 128MB sticks from the early ultra's the SS20 will see them as 64mb.

-Mike

My U5 was a freebie. That's a hard budget to beat when looking for Sparc upgrades. I don't know about where you live, but here, anything that's not x86 fetches a premium. It's very rare indeed to come across good deals on any SGI/Sun/whatever equipment.

Hmm I have 4 in mine that I had put in by mistake from a larger pile of memory and they worked. Next time I open the bugger I'll check the part numbers for clues. [Which ROM where you on by the way? I've only used 2.25 and 2.25r]

-Mike

Just wondering, where is the new mips4 packages... why do we leave platform die ?
I would like to see recent browsers/clients/apps being ported to super Silicon platform.