Adding more cores won't give them the performance boost they need either. Two cores are better than one. Add more to a personal computer (as opposed to a server) and the law of diminishing returns hits. There's the GUI, and there's some background processes. Maybe the foreground application is well-written and the processing is separate from the GUI. Four cores will have some advantage over two. Beyond that is probably a waste for a desktop. A server might use some more, but hundreds? Don't think so.
The next thing to show up will be 802.11n. Intel already has a chipset for 802.11 a/b/g/n. And they just played an important part in ratifying the standard for n.
I recently demo'd T2000s at a show in London. 8 cores, 4 way CMT - Solaris shows 32 x 1.2 GHz T1 processors. The T1 chip only has 1 FPU though, so it's only good for integer heavy, multithreaded workloads (like web servers).
It's cheap though (T1000 starts at GBP 2200 list, diskless), and the next rev will have the full 8 FPUs (one per core), and 8 way CMT for 64 CPUs in the OS. A more useful platform.
That said, for the right apps T1's fly - we demoed apache and apachebench with static pages - a T2000 vs a 3.2 GHz P4, and the T2000 serves about 6 times the pages per second (10-12,000 vs just under 2000). Customers are replacing Xeon's at a rate of between 5 and 8 to one with T2000s for web serving and Java apps.
The box is nice too, it draws under 200 Watts (75 for the CPU) and you can touch the heatsink - it's cold. Great for demos! Plus it (and the X21/4100) boxes look like Apple kit, and those dinky 2.5" drives are *so* cute (fast too - they're 73 GB 10,000 RPM SAS drives, about 300 quid each).
</OFFTOPIC ENTHUSING>
That said Solaris is *way* multithreaded, and from the reports I've read Darwin is about on a par with most of the Free unices (other than SGI's Linux) and wouldn't take much advantages of 32 cpus in a workstation. Yet.
Comments
Originally posted by synp
Adding more cores won't give them the performance boost they need either. Two cores are better than one. Add more to a personal computer (as opposed to a server) and the law of diminishing returns hits. There's the GUI, and there's some background processes. Maybe the foreground application is well-written and the processing is separate from the GUI. Four cores will have some advantage over two. Beyond that is probably a waste for a desktop. A server might use some more, but hundreds? Don't think so.
agreed.
one might find this little something interesting: http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2657
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060112-5963.html
Originally posted by tubgirl
agreed.
one might find this little something interesting: http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2657
Yup,
I recently demo'd T2000s at a show in London. 8 cores, 4 way CMT - Solaris shows 32 x 1.2 GHz T1 processors. The T1 chip only has 1 FPU though, so it's only good for integer heavy, multithreaded workloads (like web servers).
It's cheap though (T1000 starts at GBP 2200 list, diskless), and the next rev will have the full 8 FPUs (one per core), and 8 way CMT for 64 CPUs in the OS. A more useful platform.
That said, for the right apps T1's fly - we demoed apache and apachebench with static pages - a T2000 vs a 3.2 GHz P4, and the T2000 serves about 6 times the pages per second (10-12,000 vs just under 2000). Customers are replacing Xeon's at a rate of between 5 and 8 to one with T2000s for web serving and Java apps.
The box is nice too, it draws under 200 Watts (75 for the CPU) and you can touch the heatsink - it's cold. Great for demos! Plus it (and the X21/4100) boxes look like Apple kit, and those dinky 2.5" drives are *so* cute (fast too - they're 73 GB 10,000 RPM SAS drives, about 300 quid each).
</OFFTOPIC ENTHUSING>
That said Solaris is *way* multithreaded, and from the reports I've read Darwin is about on a par with most of the Free unices (other than SGI's Linux) and wouldn't take much advantages of 32 cpus in a workstation. Yet.
Cheers,
Martin.
http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php