From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Apr 18 19:40:57 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0BB6637B422 for ; Wed, 18 Apr 2001 19:40:54 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 964B16ACB8; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 12:10:51 +0930 (CST) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 12:10:51 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Rik van Riel Cc: Dennis , Alfred Perlstein , Kris Kennaway , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: The future of multiprocessors (was: SMP in 2.4 (fwd)) Message-ID: <20010419121051.D72816@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <5.0.2.1.0.20010418190439.03633920@mail.etinc.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: ; from riel@conectiva.com.br on Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 11:17:06PM -0300 Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wednesday, 18 April 2001 at 23:17:06 -0300, Rik van Riel wrote: > On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Dennis wrote: > >>> You think Intel isn't going to market dual/quad ia64 machines? >> >> Yes, but who'll need them? > > If nobody needed them, what would be the point in SELLING > them ? That's never been an argument for a good salesperson. Think of selling refrigerators to Eskimos, or the small farmer with one cow who bought a milking machine and sold his cow to pay for it. > I know you don't trust our technical instinct, but you might > at least consider the business instinct of companies like > Intel, IBM or Unisys (who all sell big SMP systems). > > Besides, there are LOTS of people who need tomorrow's performance > yesterday. There will always be a big market for overpowered, > overpriced SMP systems... And, of course, a bigger market for high-powered, reasonably priced MP systems. Note that it's cheaper to buy an SMP Intel MB with two 750 MHz processors than it is to buy one with a 1.5 GHz processor. > And as for the "but you can wait 2 years until UP is faster than > today's SMP" doesn't quite work for eg. investment banking and stock > funds. More computing power means better calculations, which means > more money. And for folks like them, computing power is not measured > in FLOPS, but in ACRES. And when you're talking 3 acres of computing > power, you'd better have some decend density (ie. SMP in 2U > rackmounted boxes, or something similarly suitable). More to the point, the processors of the not-too-distant future will have multiple processors on the single die. Multiprocessors are here to stay. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message