Adam Rifkin wrote:
> Would you instead prefer the $1000 version?
Um, I know about the $1000 version. I've read the specs, I'm
not impressed. "Faster than Ultra 5" doesn't mean a thing to
me in absence of benchmarks. I've searched for benchmarks and
so far found only http://www.dl.ac.uk/TCSC/disco/Benchmarks/multiply.html
Which seems to indicate that an UltraSPARC IIIe with 500 MHz
(29 MTransistors, 0.18 um process, 64 kByte L1 data and 32 kByte
L1 code, no on-die L2 but up to 8 MBytes off-die L2, connected with
a 256 bit bus. I/O bandwidth up to 9.6 GByte/s, memory bandwidth
of integrated SDRAM 2.4 GByte/s) will not do very well against a
current K7. Unless they got bitchen Ultra compilers, Blade 100 will
take some slashing.
Apart from CPU, you can buy a lot of hardware for 1 k$ these days.
Particularly, if you limit yourself to 15 GByte HDs and 128 kBytes of
core (they must be joking, right?).
> But for $2500 more, I can get the ultimate development platform with
> over $10,000 in dev software bundled with it:
You mean, you pay for your dev software?
> Tell me where you can get 64-bit workstations with decent dev tools for
> cheaper...
64 bit per se is meaningless, and cheap. Many years ago I was thinking buying
a *cheap* Multia, just for the sake of playing with 64 bit Linux and hacking
Alpha assembly. 64 bit native integers don't buy you a lot, if the infrastructure
is lacking.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:13:24 PDT