Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 12:10:51 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br> Cc: Dennis <dennis@etinc.com>, Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: The future of multiprocessors (was: SMP in 2.4 (fwd)) Message-ID: <20010419121051.D72816@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0104182313560.1685-100000@imladris.rielhome.conectiva>; from riel@conectiva.com.br on Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 11:17:06PM -0300 References: <5.0.2.1.0.20010418190439.03633920@mail.etinc.com> <Pine.LNX.4.21.0104182313560.1685-100000@imladris.rielhome.conectiva>
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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
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