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Subject: Re: Hardware for computer chess

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 18:43:02 06/08/03

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On June 08, 2003 at 20:09:40, Ryan B. wrote:

>On June 08, 2003 at 17:27:48, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>
>>On June 08, 2003 at 00:52:54, Ryan B. wrote:
>>
>>>What programs and what price range you looking at?  I'm sure crafty would run
>>>great on a Sun Blade 150 and the price is rather reasonable.
>>>http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?catid=85825   If your looking
>>>for the best price to performance ratio I think AMD is the front-runner.  But
>>>I?m not much of a fan for Intels high-end prices on low-end hardware, just my
>>>opinion though.
>>
>>Problem being, the Sun Blade 150 is a pile of shit.
>>
>>Seriously, a 650MHz US-IIi?
>>
>>It gets 283 on the Crafty SPEC test. A 500MHz Athlon can beat that score. It's
>>mind-blowing that Sun is charging $1395 for a computer that would get its ass
>>whooped by a PC from, like, 4 years ago.
>>
>>Just for fun, I went to newegg and priced a system with similar specs to the Sun
>>Blade 150. Unfortunately, they don't sell parts that are old enough, so I had to
>>go with a DVD drive (instead of just CD), a processor that's more than twice as
>>fast (1.1GHz Athlon), and an AGP graphics card with 3D acceleration (vs. a 2D
>>PCI card). The total price came to $253.
>>
>>So if you go with a PC, you get a system that's twice as fast for 1/5th the
>>price. Price/performance advantage of 10x... hmm...
>>
>>-Tom
>
>If you are concerned with price/performance ratio you can get a 386 system for
>$1.  http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2733773366&category=3742
> However if you prefer using a better OS, having a better programming
>environment, and using quality hardware Sun isn't so bad a choice.  For a cheep

Can't you still get Slowaris for the PC?

Also, what quality hardware? You're falling into the same trap as Mac bigots,
thinking that if you get charged more for something, it must be higher quality.
Do you think Sun makes memory, hard drives, video cards, etc. exclusively for
their own systems, or do you think that if you open up one of those Sun
workstations, you'll see that it's full of the same commodity hardware found in
PCs? It says right on their site that their PGX64 graphics card is just a
rebrand of the thoroughly antiquated ATI Rage XL. You can get one of those for
your PC for $20 if you find a store that still has some.

>second computer to run PC/windows programs I think AMD is a practical choice of
>hardware.  Also I sincerely hope you do not believe that an Athlon 500 is really
>faster than a Blade 150 computer.  Benchmarks do not always show real world
>performance.  For example according to some benchmarks my amiga 4000 is faster
>than my Pentium 100.  This is not realistic.  Also my Duron 800 scores better on
>CPU and gpu benchmarks than my G4 450 Mac.  In real world tests using PhotoShop
>and PovRay the Mac beats the Duron 800 almost every time.  Did you happen to

SPECint benchmarks Crafty, which is a real world program. Do you think the
Crafty section of SPECint is somehow not indicative of Crafty's performance? How
do you explain that?

>In the end it's all in what your most comfortable with, but if you want real
>world performance I don't think a PC will be best in any tasks other than simple
>math, and impressive benchmarking.

Sure, impressive benchmarking like Crafty benchmarking, MySQL benchmarking,
PovRay benchmarking, Linux kernel compile benchmarking, you know, stuff that
isn't real-world.

-Tom



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