From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 19 6:54:47 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from q.closedsrc.org (ip233.gte15.rb1.bel.nwlink.com [209.20.244.233]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5282437B423 for ; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 06:54:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from lplist@closedsrc.org) Received: by q.closedsrc.org (Postfix, from userid 1003) id 6AB8255407; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 06:49:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by q.closedsrc.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 594D351610; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 06:49:13 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 06:49:13 -0700 (PDT) From: Linh Pham To: Kathy Quinlan Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt , Bzdik BSD , Charles Burns , , , , , , Subject: Different Platforms (was: the AMD factor in FreeBSD) In-Reply-To: <012501c0c8a2$75ccff40$fe00a8c0@kat.lan> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 2001-04-19, Kathy Quinlan scribbled: # while we are talking on comparing different cpu classes what about sun spark # stations or SG boxes ???? Sun UltraSPARC workstations/servers are decent... the UltraSPARC IIi is somewhat under powered as a graphics workstation, but would be somewhat decent for creating apps, writing Java applications or backend code, system proc for a mid-frame server, etc. The UltraSPARC III based workstations are getting some of the horsepower that Sun has been lacking in their single/dual processor machines. SGI boxes are nice for multimedia and 3D work, but SGI has been floundering and has made several failed attempts to jump into the x86 workstation/server market. Speaking of different platforms, there is also the Compaq/DEC Alpha :) Now if you want really nice power that can also run FreeBSD... that's the way to go. Unfortunately, Digital (and now Compaq) haven't really marketed the platform very well. I would be kind of nice to see a fully ported version of Windows 2000 (64-bit of course) for the Alpha, but it really get the best out of it... go BSD, Tru64 UNIX or even VMS. # PS how did apple compare the adobe Photoshop ?? as I recall the only thing # common was the screen layout, other than that the code was completely # different. has anyone written a "C" program that is then cross compiled on # multiple platforms ????? I know this is not a real "office program" test, # but atleast would compare the functions of the cups My guess is that Adobe optimized portions of Photoshop (and I do mean portions... usually plug-ins and possibly some of the really repeated functions) for the Mac platform to take advantage of the AltiVec engine. Adobe does similar optimizations for MMX (and possibly SSE, but not SSE-2 if I recall correctly), but what we don't know is if Adobe optimizes the exact same plug-ins and function on both platforms... Apple (and quite a bit of the industry) has been known to do selective comparison; choosing the best of their product versus the worst of their competitor's product. Apple has and will always to `apples to oranges' comparisons (sorry for the pun) because they know that they sell hardware and software to a large cliche and the rest of the people either hate their guts or don't even care. -- Linh Pham [lplist@closedsrc.org] // 404b - Brain not found To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message