On Sat, 2006-01-21 at 10:45 +0000, Gavin Seddon wrote: > That's valuable info. These dual core amd's are on ebay for > 'next-to-nothing', pls tell me more, what are the PPC machines, I have > seen PPC to be an option for a Gentoo dist. but didn't know what it is. > > > 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. > > > -- > Dr Gavin Seddon > School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences > University of Manchester > Oxford Road, Manchester > M13 9PL, U.K. > PPC is the chip-set formerly used by Apple aka G4 & G5. They run slower then an x86 chip-set, but pack more into each cycle (For more info on that look up the RISC vs. CISC debate/comparisons such as here: http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/projects-00/risc/risccisc/ ). Generally speaking, with software designed for it, a G5 2.1 GHz is roughly equivalent in power to a ~AMD64 3000+.
However, you'll note I suggested the Power chip, not the Power PC chip. The Power chip is a series of chips designed and manufactured by IBM for use in heavy workstations and servers. The current generation of the Power series is called the Power5.(Links to press nause: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/news/pressreleases/2005/oct/annc_1004.html & http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/494/mackerras.html) I don't know if Gentoo supports the Power series of chips, but I do know that IBM has gotten SuSE and RedHat (at minimum) ported onto it (More useful links: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/power/articles.html ). Hope this helps. B. Vance -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
