Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 21:53:51 02/22/03
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On February 22, 2003 at 20:06:44, Jeremiah Penery wrote: >On February 22, 2003 at 17:31:35, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On February 22, 2003 at 01:49:45, Jeremiah Penery wrote: >> >>>If Xeon suddenly clocked up to 5GHz tomorrow, and all other chips stayed the >>>same, it would certainly begin eating into that market segment. Assuming >>>something near linear scaling, a 5GHz P4 would have SPECint and SPECfp near >>>1800. That's _twice_ as fast in SPECint as any currently released "server" >>>processor (POWER/Alpha/Itanium), and almost 25% faster in SPECfp than _any_ >>>processor. >> >>SPEC is not that important for servers. Ditto for mainframes. I/O is the > >If you don't like SPEC, look at TPC numbers. Let's back up to reality a minute. Servers have one type of requirement. workstations have another. I'm not about to talk about the PC platform as a high-performance server. It is _not_. The raw PCI bus is completely unable to sustain the kind of bandwidth that the high-end server market is all about, and that is a problem. Doesn't matter how fast the CPU goes. Just compare the I/O bandwidth of "server machines" with the I/O bandwidth of a PC and you will see what I mean. > >In TPC-C, the machine currently with the best price/performance ratio is a >2.4GHz P4 machine. The machine with the highest total score is a 272 processor >P3-900MHz Xeon cluster. > >In TPC-H, using the 3TB and 10TB database sizes, the machines with highest >submitted results are both 128 processor 2.8GHz P4 Xeon clusters. > >And, finally, on TCP-W, x86 machines (not clusters) win in both the 10k (8p >1.6GHz XeonMP) and 100k (16p 900MHz Xeon) item tests. > >>name of the game, and multiple channels/busses is the issue. The PC is still >>a PC, whether it is 500mhz or 50ghz. > >Of course they're not suited to some kinds of big-iron tasks, but there are >several types of server workloads that they do handle very well. Only if "very well" has a "price" component... which was my point. The high-end machines are not 100K or 500K boxes...
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