From: Andrei Chichak (acpmiedm_at_telusplanet.net)
Date: Tue Apr 20 2004 - 09:13:52 PDT
>I'll still put my Alpha up against anything that IBM/Intel/AMD has to offer
>today in the high-end desktop market. My pride might be a little bit
>overzealous.
Now factor out the crappy operating system. I remember how blazingly fast
my UNIX box was compared to running DOS on the same machine.
There is a LOT of factors that affect computer performance; processor
architecture, processor clock speed, cache size, number of levels, and
speed, memory bus width and speed, whether virtual memory translation is
used, memory wait states, memory size, I/O bus width, speed and the nature
of the transactions, whether the bus was properly terminated, is the BIOS
running out of a 8 or 16 bit wide ROM or is it in RAM, secondary storage
interface width and speed, rotational speed, head average seek time, number
of heads, sector size, cache size, nature of the I/O transaction vis a vis
the caching behaviour of the controllers, fragmentation, file system
structure, virtual memory file system structure, interrupt arbitration
architecture, number of devices asserting interrupts, DMA activity, timer
interrupt tick rate and overhead, output device bus width, speed, protocol,
operating system overhead, application efficiency, unintended application
loadings.
So, what does IBM/Intel/AMD offer at the high end?
IBM IntelliStation POWER 275 has 2-1.45GHz POWER4+ processors, 1.5MB level
2 and 8MB L3 cache, can't say how wide the memory bus is, 16GB ECC DDR
SDRAM, 320MB/s (not Mb/s like ATA drives) 10,000 RPM SCSI drives, running
AIX, yadda yadda yadda. A worthy opponent, I would expect.
AMD, hmmm they got rid of their 2900 and 29000 bit slice machines.
Intel MCS96 16-bit processor talking CAN to an automatic transmission
controller would smoke a DEC Alpha at the same task. The same Alpha would
smoke the MCS96 while running windoze solitare, but try doing it at 120
degrees C under the hood of a car in the summer and the Alpha would
definitely smoke while the MCS96 plodded along. Or better yet, a Motorola
68HC08 running off of three AA batteries, try to power up the Alpha on the
same batteries.
Apples and oranges? More like apples and hedgehogs.
Comparing computers depends on everything including the application and
physical environment. How does that old joke go? "Choose your weapon." "A
sword" "A gun, you loose".
Andrei
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