On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:32 +0000, Gavin Seddon wrote: > Hi, > thanks Duncan. I have renamed this since the topic has changed and it > isn't really relevant to updating. Has anyone seen this months new > scientist? There's an article about OS's used for browsing. It gives > the percentages of different OS used to browse the www. Windows is by > far the most and Linux has only a few percent, in the UK. > > An old colleague of mine proposed it was because ms-farce is 'better'. > I pointed out could it not be due to people in the UK generally being > uneducated or lazy. Since at Manchester in our lab we use Fedora as > it's quick to install and very easy to use so undergrads don't get > intimidated. If I had my way, Debian would be better for the majority > of systems with Gentoo on the Opterons. > > I have found Gentoo to be excellent due to it's configurability (is this > a word) and speed. I have no intention of changing now however, I am > always 'on-the-lookout for a superior workstation so I may change in the > future to ia64 Gentoo. Are Iitanium machines the best (robust/speed). > Or, are the Opterons or athlon64 better. For that matter how do amd > machines differ? > > -- > Dr Gavin Seddon > School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences > University of Manchester > Oxford Road, Manchester > M13 9PL, U.K. > There's a reason that Itinium was called the Itanic.... It's probably the biggest waste of effort Intel and HP have ever embarked on. Next to no-one supports it, and it's special features arn't really all that special compared to the average Opteron. If you want the most robust/fastest chipset, Power chips are the way to go. (Not Power PC (PPC), just Power chips). A workstation running dual Power5 chips would more or less obliterate anything you could care to throw at it.
If you're strictly speaking of the x86 world of chips (Which btw the Itanium isn't really more then >85% compatible) then the dual core socket 940 opterons are still the best chip, followed by the dual core socket 939 Athlon 64s. If you are running a rack or thirty of blades, the difference between the IA64 and the AMD64 heat output and wattage ingestion more then pays for itself. Performance wise, the Opterons are also far enough ahead of the Intel offerings to make it worthwhile to stick with AMD. YMMV and My opinions are my own. -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
