Ben-Nes Michael wrote: > Just wonder, will old UNIX ( for example the UltraSparcs ) will give better > performance then new P4/AMD ? > Does Linux support such hardware well ?
Somebody looked for used UNIXes, somebody else directed him to eBay, I noted that it is not really relevant for Israelis and that unfortunately our only alternatives is to spend thousands of Dollars for each silly station that costs hundreds in the US, and this started a huge thread about performance of RISC UNIXes vs. Linux. Well, this is not the question. And it's pity that nobody tried to ask about the purpose of these RISC's. There are real reasons for using these RISC's, but this is not the issue of this thread. I, like many others in this list, need these stations for another reason: portings. Yes, they are inferior in comparison to Linux. Even their I/O is slower. And when it comes to CPU, a "commodity" 2GHz Intel takes any RISC in its "small pocket". Not to mention used/old stations. Those take 300%-500% more time for similar tasks. And when it comes to compilations, the difference may reach 1000% (because of the need to generate RISC code, which is a very genious and brilliant task, that requires a lot of computation and generates a huge code). Of course, if the generated code is 64 bits, then the difference may reach even 1500% (because of the 4 bytes alignment that generates a much bigger code). And trust me. I did thousands of compilations in my life, on about 10 different RISC architectures, with about 13-14 different UNIXes, and dozens of versions of these UNIXes. So why people need these stations? As I wrote above, there are really good reasons for that, but this is not the issue of this thread. Why *I* need these stations? Simply. For porting. Anything that I do, I need to compile on many UNIXes. My alternative is to drive to all of the vendors. In the past, I had a computer with my own username in each of the vendors. But sometimes I found that the content of that computer was transferred to another computer and somebody forgot to transfer mine, another time the person that was in touch with me was replaced by somebody else, etc. So it took me dozens of hours to compile the stuff on all of the UNIX platforms. So for me, the performance of the slowest Solaris/Irix/Tru64UX on Earth, was still 10 times better than the performance of spending dozens of hours for visiting all the vendors. So please stop these silly comparisons. It's not fair. A RISC will never beat a fast Intel (unless you compare a 128 processors gorilla against a simgle processor PC...). Try to understand the reasons that people need these machines, and just then start your comparisons. P.S. I'll be glad to buy a used Ultra-SPARC too. It may be as slow as you want. I don't matter. So I'll be grateful if anybody has something for me (and please, don't send me too to eBay...) -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] CTO, Founder Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __________________________________________________________ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-23-7338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
